EDITORIAL - Let us not tempt fate by flirting with Estrada

Joseph Estrada just doesn’t get it. Despite being a gambler, drinker and self-confessed womanizer, he had the greatest of all fortunes to be entrusted with the highest office in the land. Yet he betrayed that rarest of trust and became the first president to be impeached.

Angered by the sniveling manipulation of evidence by his allies in the Senate during his trial, the people took matters into their own hands and drove him from Malacañang. He was later found guilty of plunder and is now only a free man because of his extraordinary pardon.

Now he wants to run again for president? What have the Filipinos done to deserve such a man? How on earth can Filipinos have the face to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the world if Estrada is allowed back into office?

The presidential election in 2010 is not just a political process to elect a new leader to lead us out of the rut we are in. More than that, it is a test of the Filipino himself, and his capacity to think rightly.

If Estrada runs and gets elected, not only will it reward everything that is wrong in a man but, more importantly, will show all the nations in the world that we do not deserve their courtesy and respect.

We will become the doormat of every country and the laughing stock of everyone. For a nation that is quick to take offense at every derogatory remark, no matter how unintended, what pride remains to be pricked after we shall have made the worst of all possible choices?

Not only internationally, but within our own borders, we will lose all moral authority to demand uprightness and ethical behavior from our officials by the unmistakable example we shall have set if we reinstall Joseph Estrada to power.

To give Joseph Estrada a new mandate is to send the strongest signal yet to all other officials that everything that is associated with him is perfectly all right with us. We lose all right and reason to demand what is good for us. We shall have deserved what we get.