Shadow cabinet

The word "shadow" when used as an adjective, connotes stealth, covertness, clandestine. It can also mean illicit, illegal, unofficial, sinister and evil. So a "shadow cabinet," one which Defense Secretary Norberto Gonzales plans to create, cannot be anything good for the incoming Aquino administration. Gonzales even brazenly describes it as a government-in-waiting. Yeah right! President-elect Noynoy Aquino has yet to officially handle the reins of government, and here we already have someone seemingly interested in taking it away from him! He even has a parting shot - yes we are not grotesquely ignorant despite Gonzales' denial - for Noynoy as the new head of government!

Gonzales must be so incensed at the fact that they could not stay in power after 2010. That Cha-cha never prospered, and that the automated elections actually worked, showing the true will of the people with regards to choosing their leaders. Officials who used to lord it over their districts found themselves practically crying foul over the pitiful numbers they garnered at the polls. A rude awakening and poetic justice.

So to stay in the limelight, as if he always was, he now wants to form a shadow cabinet, one that according to him, would monitor the acts and performance of President Noynoy Aquino. Can you get any more sinister than that? Take note that Gonzales once headed the National Security Agency of the Arroyo administration. So it is just proper that the agency be purged of all its employees, lest they become a liability to the Aquino administration. Disconcerting too is the fact that Gonzales plans to tap recently retired Gen. Delfin Bangit, who was forced to retire when it became clear that President Noynoy would not retain him as Armed Forces Chief of Staff. The general's warnings that the military should be respected may be construed as a veil threat to the new government. A fact the Aquinos know all too well.

It is one thing to say you're an oppositionist, which the former ruling party will now become. It is another to say that you're a government-in-waiting, especially this early. It only shows how humiliated one is now that he becomes an ordinary citizen, and not anything else.

I guess the use of the term "shadow" speaks volumes of the kind of character Gonzales is. He just couldn't use any other term that did not reflect his true personality.