EDITORIAL - DAP causes blindness

The president's defense of the controversial Development Acceleration Program is shot through with so many flaws and non sequiturs. Most, though, have already been dissected and discussed more thoroughly than anything else in the past few weeks or months.

But here is yet one more that has gone largely through the comb. If DAP is so essential in moving the country forward, why not just make provisions for it right there in the regular budget? Why wait for DAP to be generated from savings and then hijack such savings illegally?

Savings are generally relative. They cannot be predicted. What if there are no savings? Or if there are, what if they are not in the amounts desired? It is a most foolhardy thing for a nation to hitch its ability to move forward on the basis of the availability of savings, as what the president seems to suggest.

The president has defended the DAP in his televised address to the nation on Monday purely on the assumption that there are savings. Taking him up on that premise, does it then follow that the country will collapse in the event that savings cannot be generated?

The president said the savings are simply monies taken from slow spending agencies and given to faster spending ones. What if the slow spending agencies learn their lesson and begin to spend much faster than they used to? There will be no savings to talk about, would there? Would that be the end of DAP, therefore?

We do not think so. And so does the rest of the country. No one believes anymore what the president has said about the DAP. Had the DAP been purely what the president said it is -- innocent savings -- then it would not be worth risking a constitutional crisis for by threatening the Supreme Court with defiance.

The only reason the president has lost sight of national interest by challenging the Supreme Court is because the DAP represents the very core of his own personal interest. The DAP is the presidential pork barrel. It is the one thing that, more than his waning mandate, allows him to wield power in a real sense.

With the presidential pork that he ladles out to everyone, from legislators to local officials and his favored allies, from the courts to the constitutional commissions and the military and police, there is nothing the president wishes that he cannot get. That is what has blinded this president to everything else.