Noynoy stripped

G-SPAT
Grace Bandoy
(Contributed column by JC)

No offense meant to ardent supporters of Noynoy, some of whom are my close friends. Here is just a point of view of a non-political observer.

In every election, the easiest choice to make is, who you would not vote for. This year, it is profoundly difficult because for me the easiest identifiable candidate whom I would not vote for, (aside from Erap of course, for who would vote for a convicted plunderer) is a leading candidate, with the widest of margin in the survey, Noynoy.

He probably will be the next president and so, in my heart, I tried my best to consider and reconsider my decision, yet I became more convinced that he is my best choice on whom not to vote for. These are in my thoughts:

He really is unblemished, squeaky clean and immaculate.. His record for nine years speaks for himself. I am reminded of a friend of mine, a cocky but very articulate and bright Solicitor General. At a certain time before he started winning his cases, his critics had a heyday criticizing the way he handled his job. They said, he had a perfect record of losing all cases. Thus, his record was clean and unblemished of victory.

Like this solicitor general, Noynoy has also no record of dishonesty simply because he has no record of accomplishment at all. He was one of the prominent members of the committee of silence. I googled his name to find out if, except for his name, there was anything he did that he should be proud of.

I am sorry that I found nothing. It is time he reveals what he had done in congress for nine years, plus two years in the senate, to deserve the presidency. When he ran for Senate, he simply relied on his family name and the endorsement of his mother. Being in the Senate with no accomplishment will not hurt the nation except the wasted money paid to him as a public servant. But to be president and not knowing what to do is probably as disastrous as a corrupt president.

A prominent columnist of the Inquirer believes that since hero’s blood runs in his veins, he is a natural hero and would do nothing to shame the good name. The prominent columnist also said that what we need is a good heart and correct values and Noynoy fits to the T.

Of course heritage is a plus factor but unfortunately, this is no assurance that he too will be as upright as his parents. We do not have to look far. Look at his sister. She even gloated and flaunted her sexual indiscretions and gave press interviews of her indecent acts, in spite of the fact that at that time, her dear mother was very much alive.

She fueled salacious gossip about her sexual escapades that she grabbed the headlines for days of the local papers. Not only that. She proudly proclaimed that she will have to do a wash over of sorts, on the personality of Noynoy. To be fair, since Noynoy is not the sister’s keeper, he should publicly open how he spent his several hundred million, probably billions of pesos, if cumulatively taken together, of pork barrel.

Joker and Lacson did not spend a single centavo on their pork barrel allocations. Moreover, Noynoy has not been battle tested; we do not know how he will react to temptation, simply because he has not been where the action is. He can not honestly and truthfully say that he is goodness personified and all others are evil just because he is the son of Cory. It is sheer arrogance and hypocrisy to make such claim.

Before the death of former Pres Cory, nobody considered him of presidential caliber, not even for vice president. His party mates knew of his capabilities and did not even look at his direction when they then considered their standard bearer. Noynoy himself, conscious of his own limitations, did not even dream of being one.

When his mother died and there was public mourning, all of a sudden, his party mates in spite of knowing his limited capabilities, and taking advantage of public sentiments, pushed him to be a candidate to the noble office of the presidency.

This factual milieu clearly shows that his popularity is solely and purely for sentimental reasons, the death of Pres Cory. His supporters are praying to high heavens that the public sentiments on his parents would not wane and that the public would not see through the real Noynoy.

Stripped of all sentimentality, there is nothing in his bio data that shows he is capable of the challenges of the highest office of the land. His biodata is uninspiring, to say the least. Aside from his public office due to his lineage, he was a sales person of Mondragon Industries, and a member of the board of directors of a security agency which the family owns. How in heaven’s name will he run the country?

President Cory’s landmark of achievement in her administration was her Land Reform program. Our own 24 hectares of irrigated rice land in Kinamayan, Davao del Norte was subjected to land reform and my Dad wanted to fight it out but I counseled him to surrender the land as I explained to him that ultimately the entire country will benefit from this pestering problem of unjust distribution of wealth.

He understood the situation that each of us had to make sacrifices for the common good. This is not a unique scenario in Mindanao, then known as the Land of Promise . Little did we know that Pres Cory distributed all other people’s landholdings except her own Hacienda Luisita.

She asked all of us to make sacrifices, except her own family. Her tenants protested and in the ensuing protest several tenants were mowed down. The tenants were unarmed and no casualties were suffered on the side of the soldiers trying to disperse the tenants. Of course, Noynoy is not her mother’s keeper, nor do I intend to diminish her mother’s role as our leader who toppled the dictatorship.

But when Noynoy declared his candidacy, he was asked point blank, what he planned to do with Hacienda Luisita. He had no ready answer but promised to give a stand soon. Three months passed and still no answer. Is he really prepared?

The argument goes, that since the people lost trust in the present leadership, Noynoy comes as a white knight, enjoying the trust and confidence of the people. But why should we trust Noynoy? Has he done something to deserve our trust?”

Trust is earned, deserved and not bestowed nor inherited. We are now bombarded with propaganda about the goodness of President Cory, to the extent that Noynoy propagandists even go to the limit of declaring her a saint, in the hope that people will also view Noynoy as saint- like. The Liberal Party had even formulated its battle cry: “this (the election) is a fight between good and evil”. My goodness, don’t you agree that a man who pontificates that he represents goodness is really suspect of some loose screws somewhere.

Noynoy's handlers forgot the basic need of a responsible candidate-the need to have an advocacy. It should be pointed out that Noynoy has no advocacy at all in his public life. He won his senate seat solely upon his family name, like Loi Ejercito, Pia Cayetano, Bong Revilla and the like. This is very important to those who are very discerning.

We do not know to what directions we will be going, with him as a leader. It is fearsome to have a president who is not only unprepared and unqualified, but also to be under the control of unknown advisers and heaven forbid, under the tutelage of his movie star sister.

It becomes more dreadful because his popularity is seemingly sustained, thanks to the biased and twisted reporting of our media and most especially of a very large TV network who all have their interests to protect.

I am simply saying that Noynoy is “Not Worth Voting For” because he has no capability to govern and relies solely on the name of his parents, He has no advocacy,no achievement on his own and is pure creation of the media

Sadly, only Noynoy has all these attributes among all the presidential candidates.