[OPINION | Newspoint] No cheap President

Call him womanizer or misogynist, call him killer or dictator, and he doesn’t seem to mind.

In fact, he even brags about his own women, and he chases prospects impudently. Where the distance prevents him from making a touching pass, he sends out lewd remarks.

He demonstrated his misogyny most perversely in a recent exhortation to shoot the women of the communist New People’s Army in the genitals; that, he said, should end their “only usefulness”; he meant child-bearing.

He habitually sprinkles his speech with a cuss phrase that condemns mothers to the oldest profession, although at times he spouts the phrase with a vicious deliberation betrayed in the crispness of the utterance.

By his own admission, dictator is his nature: “If you say dictator, I am really a dictator.” And he did rule as such when he was mayor of Davao City, for more than two decades, and, as president, he has managed to do the same to no small extent.

He has confessed to 4 kills by his own hand, half the number recalled by a man who confessed, at a Senate hearing, to being an assassin on his Davao death squad. “Kill” is in fact his standing order to the police prosecuting his brutal war on drugs, and, with help from vigilantes, they have responded with more than 12,000 kills to date, by modest estimates.

Call him killer, dictator, womanizer, misogynist, whatever, but don’t you call him thief. After all, more than president, he is dictator, remember? If he can do what he wants, take what he wants, he does not have to stoop to the level of thief.

That’s how the aberrant mind of Rodrigo Duterte the supreme narcissist works. Except for thief, those things he’s called are exactly the sort that swell his sense of power and machismo. But thief? It does not suit his type. What train of sense he makes, if he makes any, can only be discerned and followed within the context of his disorder – he thinks the way he does because he’s a case.

In his own mind, Duterte will doubtless be able to square his avowed aversion to theft with, say, the kind of company he keeps. But, for now, never mind how he does it – leave that to the clinicians. Let’s just focus on that curious company, for our own normal, useful, and relevant purpose.

Duterte is the presumed leader, being president, of a gang of 4 whose other members are themselves tainted by thievery, by plunder in fact: Joseph Estrada, the former president and now mayor of Manila, is a plunder convict; Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, an ex-president, too, and now Deputy Speaker, was accused of the same crime; and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has carried the stigma from the 14-year dictatorship of his father, whom Duterte expressly, avowedly idolizes.

To be sure, Duterte is neither a maverick nor an eccentric. The nuance of unorthodoxy that those descriptions carry does not apply to him; he’s neither admirable nor harmless. At any rate, however superior and different, or even unique, he thinks he is, he has been unable to escape accusations of, if not stealing per se, something that suggests it. What he’s being accused of, for now, anyway, is simply hiding wealth, but wealth that, precisely because it’s hidden, inspires suspicions it was ill-gotten.

The Office of the Ombudsman has reported tracing at least P100 million to secret bank accounts in the names of Duterte and his daughter, Sara, his own successor as mayor of Davao. These findings match some of Senator Antonio Trillanes IV’s own. It was Trillanes who brought the case to the Ombudsman. He alleges a total hidden wealth of P2 billion. Just this week, he reported uncovering, through his own investigation, bank accounts holding P200 million in Duterte’s common-law wife’s name.

At the rate things are turning up, Duterte will be less and less able to avoid being portrayed in terms his ego cannot take – being reduced to a common criminal. In a panicked effort to do something, his enforcers are throwing threats and twisting the law around. But only one way will stop a further cheapening of the President, and he has to do it himself: he must come clean with a waiver.

But, again, there had better be no less than P2 billion in those secret accounts. Nothing cheaper will do it. – Rappler.com