EDITORIAL - Interrupted, restarted

There seems to be a lot of confusion generated by the Comelec announcement that more than four hundred elected officials, mostly governors, mayors and councilors, need to vacate their posts for failing to file or failing to file appropriately their statements of contributions and expenditures.

The statement of contributions and expenditures is a requirement after an election and is ostensibly meant to monitor and ensure that election budgets of candidates stay within equitable parameters so as to level the playing field.

The matter of keeping tabs on election budgets is a ridiculously contradictory imposition by the poll body, considering that prior to an election, it disqualifies those who do not have the means to mount what it terms as a credible campaign.

In other words, the logic of the Comelec is this -- if you have no money to spend, why bother to run in an election where you will only be a nuisance candidate. But if you have money to spend, you cannot also spend as much as you wish to be fair to everybody. What a twisted sense of logic. But that is another story.

Back to the call of the Comelec for those who supposedly failed to file their statements of contributions and expenditures. At first it seemed that the Comelec simply wanted to get back into the limelight.

The Comelec couldn't have been serious about its latest caper because shortly after it dropped the bombshell, hordes of those it alluded to have come out publicly with the documents to prove that they have in fact complied with the requirement. It seems it may have been the Comelec that goofed.

That is until, of all people, Mar Roxas came into the picture. Roxas, who continues to get a beating in both mainstream and social media over his Tacloban debacle, suddenly reintroduced himself into the picture by warning the officials in the crosshairs of the Comelec that he will be going after them if they don't comply.

Oh so, Roxas has found a new heroic role to play, that of the new savior of electoral laws. Suddenly it now seems uncanny how the Comelec suddenly interrupted all the Roxas-bashing with a seeming red herring, and for Roxas to suddenly pick up the gauntlet as if on cue.

Was the sudden and controversial Comelec announcement deliberately made to produce an effect meant to draw public attention away from where it was then riveted? Is there a script being played out here that people do not know of? Is the public being taken for suckers again?