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Herbie Gomez

I DON’T know how making up a story about a senator’s bank account in Singapore can pass off as a “trap.”

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But that was exactly what President Duterte said about why he “invented” a bank account number and attempted to make this nation believe that Sen. Antonio Trillanes was stashing unexplained wealth overseas.

And so Trillanes went to Singapore to show that the bank account Duterte claimed the senator has is non-existent.

The President’s response was that he merely “invented” the account number and that Trillanes fell into his “trap”? How? Why is it a trap?

What Trillanes did was use Duterte’s so-called “trap” against the President. He cooked Duterte with the President’s own oil.

From where I am sitting, it is Duterte’s credibility, not Trillanes’s, that suffered a terrible blow here. Trillanes wasn’t the one who confessed to lying and fabricating a story against a political enemy.

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Here’s another Duterte empty talk: he says he ordered the police to kill his son Paolo if the Davao vice mayor is found to have links to the illegal drug trade.

Coming from Duterte, it must have been another meaningless pronouncement. But it is revealing; it tells us about how his mind President works. It tells us that Duterte actually thinks that he can just order the police to kill anyone he pleases.

It was probably something he expected the public not to take seriously. But be that as it may, I hope that Duterte realizes that he is a president, not a king. That means, he may not decree the killing of any of his children or anyone for that matter on mere suspicion of guilt. Duterte has to understand, too, that the Philippines is functioning under a democracy, not autocracy or monarchy. Read this: Duterte’s word is not the law.

It really makes me wonder. Why is it so difficult to stop killing people in the guise of the “war on drugs”? What is so wrong with arrests, prosecution, conviction and imprisonment?

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The President is chairman of a political party that was partly founded by the late senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.. His party, which is a merger, is the original “dilawan.”

Here’s a bit of history for the unread and those who have forgotten or are deliberately trying to forget in order to revise our historical narrative:

PDP-Laban stands for “Partido Demokratikong Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan.” PDP, on one hand, was founded by former Senate President Nene Pimentel who was placed under house arrest by the then strongman Ferdinand E. Marcos when the former was mayor of Cagayan de Oro. On the other hand, Laban was organized by Ninoy Aquino, another Marcos victim, in time for the 1978 interim elections.

In the ’80s, PDP and Laban merged and became the dominant opposition party against Marcos’ Kilusang Bagong Lipunan or KBL. In fact, PDP-Laban played a major role in the 1986 Edsa Revolution.

The Liberal Party and Nacionalista Party were virtually dead — or no one felt their presence — during that period. They were only resurrected after the 1986 People Power.

LP was never the original “yellow,” PDP-Laban is. Yes, PDP-Laban, Duterte’s party now, is the original “dilawan.”

Which is why it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Duterte formed his own “Kilusang Pagbabago” right after he used PDP-Laban as his political vehicle to Malacanang. He has spat on everything that the original PDP-Laban stands for, and he knows that sooner or later, he would need to return to his original “Kilusan” where his heart truly belongs. Pastilan.

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