The Evolution of a Philippine Crocodile

 THE CROCODILE EVOLVES INTO A DINOSAUR

The recent coup d’état in the Philippine Senate is a political maneuver designed to protect the gigantic culprits of this massive heist. This is a declaration of ruthlessness by a man who was voted by a mere small fraction of the population, and despite being only fourth in the line of presidential succession, wields power with the impunity of a despot. He has systematically purged dissenters, installed loyalists, and bent the upper chamber to his will, all without holding the highest office in the land. That alone should alarm us.

According to some of his important critics, his godlike power is not rooted in constitutional legitimacy, but in the shadowy endorsement of an international agency whose influence renders him untouchable. The corruption he leaves in his wake is not subtle. It is grotesque, sprawling, and so brazen that it evokes comparisons to the darkest chapters of our history. And yet, the public remains eerily silent. Bewitched, perhaps, or exhausted? Many still defend him, although he has never advanced the nation’s legislative agenda. However, he has mastered the art of spectacle, giving abundant bribes to the undeserving masses, amassing wealth, flaunting luxury, and cloaking his family in opulence while the country staggers.

Indeed he has become the name that must not be spoken. To implicate him is to invite peril, harassment, exile, even assassination. This is the climate we now inhabit: one where truth-tellers flee the country just to speak freely, and where critics are silenced by fear.

Even as other nations rise in protest against corrupt assemblymen, he and his cult of thieves remain unfazed. Now he orchestrates the ousting of the Senate president and installs a figure so laughably unqualified, so devoid of legal acumen, that it feels like a cruel joke played on the nation. And yet, no one laughs, because the joke is on us.

Our political landscape has become a theater of absurdity. The educated, who are supposed to be the bastion of resistance, now shrink from confrontation. They have surrendered to defeat, and not to reason. They acknowledge, however reluctantly, that this fourth man in succession has become the most powerful figure in the country despite lacking in merit and national mandate, by serving as the local avatar of a foreign deep state whose interest lies so far from prosperity, and will always give us perpetual chaos.