“What a bort pet!”

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make crazy. And that is probably the best insight anyone can have as to why Noynoy Aquino and Mar Roxas found it so difficult to help Tacloban if it remained in the hands of Mayor Alfred Romualdez, and so easy to rush to an SM mall following a jewelry store robbery.

There is simply no comparison between the devastation suffered by Tacloban in the aftermath of Yolanda, the strongest typhoon ever to hit land in recorded history, and the commotion caused by a group of robbers who hammered their way through glass cases of jewelry.

The loss of lives from Yolanda will likely hit 10,000 even if the official count has been stopped in order to give Noynoy a good night's sleep. The joke goes that the reason Noynoy hates body counts is because in times of tragedy, he tends to count bodies instead of sheep and therefore could not sleep.

In the SM mall heist, nobody loses any sleep, except perhaps for the few shoppers who got traumatized by all the shouting and running. Everything was presumably insured, so nobody really lost anything, with the exception of course of a good press for Noynoy and Mar when people saw through the ruse in their rush to SM.

Supertyphoon Yolanda caused billions upon billions of pesos in property and crop losses, not to mention severely disrupted lives, abandoned opportunities, and simply wasted time. If anyone had any willingness to help, Tacloban in those very first few days was the place and the time.

Noynoy and Mar wanted Romualdez to give up the reins of Tacloban so the national government can come in, and Romualdez needed to put that down in writing. Before I will go any further, I have one question that Noynoy and Mar have to answer -- what was Mar doing in Tacloban in the first place?

If Mar had no intention of helping Tacloban unless Romualdez cries uncle on paper, why did he go to Tacloban to wait out the storm? In the days prior to Yolanda, he could just have texted Romualdez his demand. That he did not and instead went to Tacloban was because he wanted to grab credit as a first responder.

Mar blames Romualdez as a failure. No, it was not Romualdez who was a failure but Mar. Romualdez was a victim, just like every Taclobanon was on that day. But Roxas went to Tacloban hoping that when the storm clears and the cameras start running, his boots would be the first on the ground.

But Mar miserably failed to appreciate the strength of Yolanda. Had he correctly made out Yolanda, I will bet Noynoy's cigarettes Mar will not choose to wait out the storm in Tacloban. Mar was in Tacloban for the opportunity to advance himself. When that fell through, he blamed Romualdez.

You may ask why Noynoy is in all this when he was not in Tacloban at the time the storm struck? Noynoy is in all this because, when Mar got into hot water over Tacloban and Romualdez, Noynoy came out in his defense saying he knew all along what was happening and that everything has his consent and approval.

Why, Noynoy even went further by saying that, faced with Romualdez's refusal to sign away his authority as mayor of Tacloban, he could have had him removed, based on some provision in the NDRRMC law. What? The NDRRMC law can supplant a direct mandate of the people obtained in a free and democratic election?

Where in heaven did Noynoy get such a notion? If that is the case, then let us stop all elections altogether. Anyway they are very expensive to hold and seem to always slide into violence. Without elections, we can also scrap the Comelec. Let us just wait for typhoons and let the NDRRMC choose our leaders.

But if you think that is a crazy idea, what do you think of the president of a republic and his trouble-shooting president-in-waiting (kuno) rushing to the scene of a robbery inside a mall. In fact, what were they themselves thinking?

Under normal circumstances -- take note, under normal circumstances -- a president and a presidential wannabe are supposed to be whisked away from any situation that has the potential for danger. Even if the duo, feeling gung ho, insisted on taking a look, it would still be in the national interest to whisk them away.

But no, they just had to be at the scene of a robbery, when only a month ago they told Taclobanons “bahala na kayo sa buhay nyo” in face of the greatest disaster this country has ever seen in many many years. As what my eldest daughter used to say as a child in incomprehensible situations -- “what a bort pet!”