Comelec chair's chutzpah
Posted on May 22, 2007 - Filed Under General |
I HAVE voted. Saw some of my favorite candidates win and some of them lose. It would have been convenient to merely sit on my easy chair and let all the intrigues, recriminations and doubts of the election season pass like so much temporary aberrations — but my gut tells me something’s very wrong. And it’s got something, nay, everything to do with this man Benjamin Abalos, the guy who has a knack for keeping a straight face and wearing this little, fleeting smile while spewing out terminological inexactitudes to answer just about any criticism coming his Commission’s way.
If he doesn’t know it yet, Abalos is skating on thin, very thin, ice now.
He’s taxing the people’s patience with his antics, bringing it ever closer to breaking point, the way he’s handling the reported Mindanao cheating. No government functionary to date has stretched his office’s credibility, almost deliberately, to the limit than he. Imagine, the very official who should feel properly so enraged over the wanton desecration of the right of suffrage in an integral part of the archipelago, even practically assuring the doers of the misdeed that their shenanigan may yet be condoned.
According to the Abalos dictum, doubtful returns from that area, whatever the public testimonies may adversely indicate about these, will be included in the national canvassing and made the basis for an eventual proclamation of winners – unless witnesses to the reported anomaly come forward to testify and file the complaints. Abalos must be a first-class joker to ever think a witness in that troubled part of the land, granted that there are any, would risk his or her neck at being identified just to satisfy his condition for Comelec action.
Why doesn’t Abalos or his commissioners investigate things moto propio, or on their own initiative, if he’s really interested to know the truth and preserve whatever little credibility is left of his domain? You don’t wait for the fireman to arrive to try and put out a fire starting inside your house; you get hold of the nearest fire extinguisher or pail of water yourself to try and put it out. And you don’t wait for days (say, after the special elections in Lanao del Sur?) to do it; you do it pronto.
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