Redundant

We have all already paid for the clowning of a miniscule minority.

The past few days, the peso was priced down relative to other regional currencies. In the absence of any good news, the market picked on the bad: anxiety over the possibility, no matter how remote, of a new round of political volatility arising out of the filing of an impeachment complaint against the President.

I realized we are all paying for the folly of a few when I filled up my tank the other day. With world oil prices already intolerably high, any weakness in the peso will magnify the pain for consumers.

A certain madness seems to have descended upon those who have made a grand obsession of impeaching the President. In psychoanalysis, it is called fetishism.

Sunday night, for no reason at all, they stayed awake at the Batasan compound to file a re-issued impeachment complaint the first thing Monday. The facile excuse for this orgy of stupidity was some fear that someone else might beat them to the gun and file a complaint ahead of theirs. In psychoanalysis, an irrational fear like this one is called phobia.

That complaint basically repeats the one defeated at the House of Representatives last year.

Not only are the charges recycled, it now appears that those possessed by impeachment fetishism also intend to keep filing the same document repeatedly. Last Tuesday, former vice-president Teofisto Guingona filed exactly the same complaint. The leftist band Akbayan will file the same thing next.

Pity the House Secretary-General. By now he must be feeling that he was unwittingly cast in some sequel to the movie Groundhog Day.

Only in the Philippines does a comedy like this one happen, committing a complete travesty of what ought to be a solemn political process.

Lawyers for the group announced they will keep filing and refilling the same document until Congress reopens on the third week of July. They say they are doing this repetitive act in order to avoid being hit by "technicality".

I say this is a clear indication of obsessive compulsive behavior – laced with a generous dose of paranoia.

Others will probably conclude that the anti-Arroyo groups are doing this to compensate for the utter lack of substance of the complaint. The only way to get the public interested in this effort, in the absence of anything explosive in the complaint, is to keep in warm and on the front pages repeatedly.

Redundancy in place of substance. That is all this is about.

But the redundant behavior only underscores the desperation of those who seek to make a cottage industry of impeachment. Soon this will become habitual. Every year, we might expect impeachment complaints to be filed – and filed repeatedly. Every president thereafter will have to face impeachment proceedings every year.

Instead of evolving effective government, the practice of redundant impeachment that the anti-Arroyo groups are now trying to ingrain will trivialize our political process, debase our institutions and cheapen political debate.

These madmen are indulging in wanton distraction. They want to degrade our legislative institution into an arena for partisan theatrics. They want to convert every legal channel into a weapon for the sustained harassment of those whose job it is to govern.

Among the new items added to what is basically a recycled impeachment complaint – one that seems to cause this complaint to self-destruct – is an argument that says, in so many words, that the President ought to be removed from office because a number of militants have been shot by unknown assailants.

The complainants argue, without evidence, that the series of killings is the handiwork of agents of the state. Assuming that, they say that the killings are either a policy of state or they happen with the tact approval of the President. For that reason, she should be impeached.

I say this is not only a major leap in logic, it is also a total misunderstanding of the principle of command responsibility.

If the logic of the impeachment complaint is to be applied equally to all citizens, then Teddy Casino should now be in jail for brutality and frustrated homicide.

Last Tuesday, in another instance of redundant behavior, Casino led a Maoist mob in a march on the Palace. The mob chanced upon an innocent bystander who happened to fit their stereotype of a plainclothes policeman and promptly beat him up into a bloodied pulp.

This is not the first time an incident like this one happened. Citizens, especially those who sport pot-bellies, are best forewarned to stay clear of Maoist mobs for their own safety.

These mobs have a great tendency to be gripped by extreme paranoia leading to insanely cruel behavior. It is the same paranoia that caused the communist movement to occasionally torture and kill thousands of their own comrades in repetitive purges – including the one that now seems to be in progress aimed, according to the grapevine, at those who played footsies with right-wing coup conspirators.

Should those possessed by the disease of redundancy be allowed to commandeer the nation’s agenda?

I should hope not. There are thousand other issues and a thousand other items for action that ought to more fruitfully preoccupy us.

That pathetic lot bent on making impeachment proceedings a cottage industry of sorts have lost touch with all the parameters of statesmanship. They keep babbling about losing out the first time on "technicalities."

To this day, they have not realized that impeachment is a solemn act by a sovereign people. The reason that, in a presidential system, terms of office and immunity from suit are guaranteed is to allow governance to happen without constantly being entangled in partisan jousts. Responsible representatives of the people conduct an impeachment proceeding only if it is clear that there is the broadest public consensus that this is the way for the nation to go.

Impeachment was never intended to become a means for a partisan carnival where all the political freaks exhibit their unseemly disabilities.