Lies, lies, lies

PRESUMABLY, the plan was to snatch away Rodoldo Lozada from testifying at the Senate Hearing on the botched ZTE-National Broadband Network mess and, in the words of environment secretary Atienza, save the country from being delivered in a platter to the opposition—which, come to think of it, may actually be a happy consequence because with the way this administration is running this country to ruins one would not even hesitate any option as hard and as stupid as the devil and the deep blue sea.

The plan worked—at least for a couple of hours, until the media went berserk looking for Lozada who was, though the police won’t admit, already on the brink of getting enlisted among the growing number of disaparecidos.

But the punchline was when the president’s men flooded the media with press conferences saying in loud unison that they have been besmirched to be tagged as kidnappers and abductors when all they did was save Lozada from death threats, imagined or otherwise. They brandished documents, which later was discovered to have been done post-factum and under duress, to prove their honesty as congenital liars do, because honest people do not need documents to strengthen their virtue. Honesty is in the eyes and does not need documents to prove itself.

To get the whole spin right to the side of the president’s men, they demanded to be heard at the Senate hearing to clear their names. The hearing lasted more than it was worth. But at the end of the day, only the gullible and the decrepit believed that the president’s men were honest and clean, because everybody else saw lies one tier after another.

The kidnapping or whatever is it called is not the issue. It is not even the cancelled ZTE-NBN deal which is the very stuff gigantic corruptions are made of. It is lies, lies and lies.

A government that is both founded and operated on lies is not fit to govern. It does not only bear a psychological impediment to normal governance, it frustrates the very reason for which it was entrusted in the first place—the common good. Governance being a public trust cannot survive with lies or else it deprives itself of its very reason for being. It crumbles like a sand castle in a matter of time.