While the Filipino suffers, Senators glory under klieg lights

As expected, howls of protests issued from the mouths of opposition congressmen when President Arroyo came out with an executive order requiring key personnel, including military officers, to get a clearance before appearing in congressional investigations. Happening just a week after she warned street demonstrators of "calibrated preemptive" response, the martial law bogey-man must have morphed into a terrifying specter in the minds of PGMA's critics. Yet to most people the President was just doing what she was elected to do: Govern!

There's chaos in the streets. More chaos in Congress as its witch-hunt goes on. Oil prices have gone crazy. The peso is losing its worth. And the Filipino is suffering. With all these, do they expect the President to sit idly by and just flash her motherhood smile? No siree. The government has bent back far enough. In has bent back, in fact, for too long. That's why we are where we are: A third world country in an Asian oasis of prosperity.

Look at our neighbors who are not so fetish about human rights. Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, and lately, Vietnam. All have strong-fisted governments, but who cares? As long as order and peace prevail and every poor man's table has a bowl of rice and fish, who cares if individual rights are pruned here and there now and then?

In Singapore, where this writer stayed for a year when Lee Kwan Yu was prime minister, media outlets were in the hands of the government. Service facilities such as bus lines, taxis, water and power offices were state-run. The whole of the city state was a national property and land ownership was limited to very few. Yet the country was a magnet to foreign investors, the reason why its economy was (and still is) the red-hot engine in Asia. Unemployment was unheard of. Instead of slum hovels the poor had high rise condominia where family-owned "flats" served as living quarters. Trees were everywhere and landscapes spaces made Singapore a garden city.

Contrast this to the din and dust in our cities whose slums and garbage dumps proclaim their misery and squalor on the faces of malnourished kids. What price are we paying for the rights we enjoy? What have we reaped from too much freedom? Freedom or a surfeit of it we savor delightedly; and we seem to look down on our naïve Asian brothers. But excessive freedom has brought in a cabal of pseudo-nationalists brandishing angry banners and shouting angrier demands. This has spawned the opposition whose thirst for power is equaled only by their disregard of the law. Worse, too much freedom has sired a Senate whose mania for tv cameras is a national shame.

Safe in their sanctum sanctorum, what do they care about fuel pump prices? What do they know about costly food items? Don't they have millions for pork and millions more for perks? On with the muro-muro! On with the klieg lights!

Picture yourself a trusted confidant of the President. Out of your desire to serve, you signed a document which later fell into the hands of Senators. What will happen to you? The high and mighty gentlemen would pounce on you with sneers and insults, and then complete your humiliation with incarceration! Where's your dignity as a human being?

For such glaring abuse of legislative power PGMA issued EO 464. Certainly, it will delimit the investigative prerogative of Congress. But it will delimit too its abuse on the use of such prerogative. Instead of wasting their time on endless investigations, which has been used by the opposition as fora to hit back at the Administration, why don't the good gentlemen concentrate on what they were elected for: Craft legislations!

Some say it is not right for the President to put a gag on Congress. But was it right for the latter, particularly the Senate, to delight on the testimony of shady characters and have this broadcast to the entire world? Politics, they say, is perception. Every Jose, Pedro and Juan who mouths dirty lies in the full light of congressional cameras leaves a dark stain in the minds of most observers. This is the effect the die-hard critics of Malacañang would like to create. In aid of legislation? Tell that to the marines!