The persistent popularity of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte continues to baffle the “experts”. No less than Mahar Mangahas, resident popularity survey “expert” of the Inquirer.net issued an evidently painfully convoluted “clarification” of the most recent poll which showed Duterte at a par with the likes of the presidential greats of the last 20 years (notably, former President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III was not among these greats trailing Duterte by almost 10 points).
What is interesting is this bafflement is exactly the same bafflement the Opposition gnashed their teeth about a year ago in 2016 when Duterte aced the elections hands down. In short the Philippine Opposition continue to fail to understand what they are up against.
The no-brainer here is that to even think of going up against a popular politician in a “democracy”, an Opposition needs to work together and unite. So the no-brainer strategic problem the Philippine Opposition faces is that they lack that credible uniting personality. This is a showstopper considering most Opposition ideologies (perhaps with the exception of the commies) are all personality-based. Indeed, the most influential and resource-rich faction of the Opposition, the Liberal Party (collectively known as the “Yellowtards” in the vernacular) are really no more than a personality cult disguised as a “modern” political party. To the average Yellowtard, the political landscape is divided on the basis of who “worships” who.
| SUPPORT INDEPENDENT SOCIAL COMMENTARY! Subscribe to our Substack community GRP Insider to receive by email our in-depth free weekly newsletter. Opt into a paid subscription and you'll get premium insider briefs and insights from us. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter, GRP Insider! Learn more |
Take the popular Twitter “activist” Francis B Baraan who believes that supporters of Duterte are “satanists” and, presumably, that opposition “leaders” like current “vice president” Leni Robredo are “saints”. So much for 21st Century thinking. Yet, Baraan commands close to 26,000 followers on Twitter — which says something about the way Yellowtards “think” in this day and age.
From that vantage point, it is easy to see why the Opposition — led by the Yellowtards — remain baffled and unable to gain any new ground in their efforts to chisel away at the popular mandate Duterte continues to enjoy. They do not understand the enemy. They didn’t back in 2016 and they still do not (or kennat in the current Imperial Manila lingo) even today. Not knowing your enemy when you go to battle is, as most thinking Filipinos know, one of Sun Tzu’s mortal sins of warfare…
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
In the case of the Philippine Opposition, it knows neither the enemy nor itself. The fact that the Opposition lacks any consistent ideological underpinning around which to unite is evidence that it is hopelessly stuck in a crisis of both ideology and relevance. This is because it had built its relevance on a fabled Laban (“fight”) narrative that had been worn to tatters by 30 years of overuse and had built an ideology of saintly “heroes” and satanic “dictators” reminiscent of the quaint mythologies that once propped up the theocracies of ancient civilisations.
Many anti-Marcos activists recoil at the sight of Opposition rallies hijacked by the Yellowtards.
(Source: @mumay_tonton on Twitter)
The challenge for those who genuinely would like to reform the Opposition is to purge it of the clowns who infest it with medieval thinking and behave like religious zealots on social media. That’s a tall order if one considers how much the Yellowtards dominate the Philippine Opposition. It is quite obvious that Duterte won the 2016 elections on the back of a widespread public disgust for everything “yellow”. Indeed, included in the campaign paraphernalia used by the Duterte campaign machine were images of yellow colours dominating crowds of rallying Opposition “activists”. Even the relatively multi-partisan and multi-faith community of Martial Law Crybabies lament rallies that had failed because of what they perceived to be an effort hijacked by the Yellowtards.
The obvious starting point to reinvigorate the Philippine Opposition and get it to a state that will make it a potent and intelligent enough force to keep the Duterte administration — and its “die hard” supporters — honest is to break out of the obsolete and circular thinking it is currently imprisoned in. To do that it will need to get to know the enemy better. Only when that understanding is achieved could the Opposition begin the journey of answering, the truly difficult questions…
Why did the Liberal Party lose the 2016 elections?
Why does Duterte continue to be popular?
Why are Filipinos happy with the “war on drugs”?
Why aren’t Filipinos concerned about Martial Law?
The fact is…
Religion and voodoo thinking have proven to offer no answers to these questions.
As such, it is a pointless and rather primitive exercise to be using concepts such as “good” and “evil” in modern political discourse. Certainly, labelling people you don’t like as followers of “Satan” does not help. Unfortunately for the Philippine Opposition, such concepts and artefacts remain deeply-cherished relics of 1980s thinking that continue to remain ingrained in their “activist” paraphernalia.
To learn from one’s mistakes, one needs to get real and face the truth. If one remains fixated in archaic beliefs and avoids evaluating evidence with a critical mind, guess what: no lessons will be learned.
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
#1 there is absolutely no point of comparison between duterte and abnoy. #2 this francis baraan is an insignificant non-entity therefore not worth mentioning even if his satanic followers are a-many. #3 purging of the LP, the yellow cult, and all its sympathizing yellowtards will be the greatest service to the country, though it is a known fact that they will not even think of anything along these lines.
The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.
The danger of an impertinent and irrelevant opposition led by Robredo and the Liberal Party is a cocksure presumptuous Duterte who will end up for sure as a benevolent tyrant like Marcos where occasional assassination is as routine and common as the Metro Manila traffic.
Somebody has to rise as a rallying leader who find Robredo and the Liberal Party and Duterte and his ass licking balimbing former LP members and their poon Alvarez as detestable as the dog’s watery poop.
Filipino’s need to realize ,and if Duterte’s first year in office doesn’t make it abundantly clear, that the Politicians that run the country are stealing everything the country has to offer and giving nothing to the people that inhabit the country, NOTHING ! Politicians ALL, including Duterte, serve the Oligarchs…and that is all there is to it. The interests of the people are not considered in the least, theminimum wage in the country ius a bad joke and enables the exploitation of call center workers.Other than that the country has NOTHING to offer its citizens , nevermind the rest of the world (outside on OFW’s as slaves!) and Duterte is another politician that has promised much but done little but have a hand in the murders of 7,700 of his fellow citizens….and thats it…
I’m not sure about Duterte but it’s clear the opposition are really the irrational ones here. They’re reeling from the loss and exposure, the humiliation for being defeated by some guy who has never been part of those ruling bourgeoisie from Luzon. There hasn’t been much proof of corruption on Duterte so please stop it with your nihilistic made up bullshit. The truth is, much of media, office, pretty much most powerful institutions in the country are against him so it’s why they keep giving out these negative impressions about him. Indeed, somebody has to really stand up to the big dogs who think the nation ought to be under their hegemony.
The opposition headed by the Aquino Cojuangco political axis used and is using the “Cult of Personality” political tactic; Fake News; Fake History; used religion for politics; election cheating; etc…
They have no Real Issues, to present to us. They have no solutions, to present; to solve the problems of our country.
They are political obstructionists, shouting political slogans; wearing Yellow clothes; showing “L” signs on their fingers…It means “Losers”…for Kris Aquino: it is “Libog”…
They have not yet, clarified themselves with what they have done to the country, when they were in power. Like the : DAP , PDAP, Pork Barrel Bribery, Typhoon Yolanda Fund disappearance, Gold reserve thievery, Mamapasano massacre, Hacienda Luisita massacre, Shabu Drug proliferation, Leila De Lima Drug Cartel, Pnoy Aquino and Mar Roxas partnership with the Chinese Triad Mafia, Porky Drilon voracious appetite with Pork Barrel, etc…
Who would believe these bunch of clowns, thieves and retarded…
tama si benigno, utang ina nyo mga gagong dilaw. fk shet
The yellows are traitors who have only their own self interest in mind. These are the kind of people that will hold back the progress of our country because of their lust for power and money
The Opposition can’t afford to purge the yellows just yet because the yellows hold the purse strings.
The Liberal Party lost the 2016 presidential elections because Mar Roxas insisted on being the standard bearer. Why was Mar, who was so obviously unwinnable, allowed to become the party’s candidate for the top position? Because Mar brought in the money (where the money came from is another story).
Why was another unwinnable personality, Leni Robredo, who was not only unwinnable (in a clean election), but unknown and grossly unqualified, able to become the party’s candidate for the second-highest position? Because she is Mar’s kumare and the widow of Mar Roxas’s bosom buddy Jesse, and Mar could trust her not to betray him. Remember, it was Mar who got Jesse Robredo appointed to DILG. Mar and the Robredos go way, way back.
My point is, the members of the Liberal Party committed the same mistake the Democrats did in the US. They let an unwinnable personality bully them into letting him/her become standard bearer and call the shots, because he/she had access to resources. They let this one unwinnable personality promote his/her personal interests, at the expense of the whole party. So they all ended up in the kangkungan. Bernie Sanders had a better chance of winning against Trump than Hilary Clinton, but Clinton elbowed him out. So when she sank, she took the whole party down with her. Same with Mar.
The ones who bailed out of the Liberal Party after Duterte won were the smart ones. They’ll live to fight another day. The ones who are still in LP, especially the frontline attack dogs like Bam Aquino, Kiko Pangilinan, Risa Hontiveros and Edcel Lagman, are the really dumb ones (Trillanes should be on the list too, except LP is too ashamed to admit he’s one of them). They’re so tainted now that no other party will touch them, not even groups who might challenge Duterte in the future, because the stench of yellow is just so bad now, and the smell on them can no longer be washed off.
Now Edcel Lagman says he’s going to challenge Congress’s approval of the extension of martial law in Mindanao before the Supreme Court. He knows it’s a lost cause, but he’s going to do it anyway, just so he can squeeze more anti-martial law media mileage out of the issue, and keep the SC justices tied up so they won’t have time to discuss the Bongbong Marcos VP electoral protest.
There should be a law against habitual filing of cases at the SC. Lagman, Leila de Lima, Leni Robredo, and all the yellows should be given a limit so they stop wasting the SC’s time with their self-serving motions and filings. What about the cases of ordinary people and other important cases that have been pending at the SC for years? When will the SC resolve those? Why is CJ Sereno always prioritizing the cases filed by her yellow cohorts?
Sereno should shape up. She may think she has security of tenure, but today, we witnessed over 90% of the upper and lower houses of Congress support the President without one cent of pork barrel to “incentivize” them. Sereno’s backer, Noynoy Aquino, had to spend billions to get those same mercenaries to vote to impeach and convict Chief Justice Corona, and by a much lesser margin. Duterte won’t need to spend a cent. Not with today’s awakened Filipino citizenry.
So, dear children, learn your Mar lesson. Stop coddling Leni Robredo and the yellows, unless you want to go down with them. No amount of manipulated survey results will change the reality on the ground that the kumare who nominally chairs your party is politically dead.
Matter of fact, they were scraping the end of the barrel when they chose to pair Leni Robredo to become Roxas’ running mate. No one – absolutely no one was willing to become associated with Mar Roxas after all the debacles he personally orchestrated – and his stench was that bad they won’t risk their skins being coupled with him. Only the naive Leni – or maybe not so naive really, finally gave in and gave it a shot. She may have thoughts and opinions of her own on how to run the country, but believe you me that all those were put into the backburner only to have the agenda of the Liberal Party take precedence over her own. Make her follow the script so to speak. And there you have it. Whatever good it did it to her, snarling and grappling against this current administration has only earned her no love from the populace at large – even those based in foreign lands. A strategy not so well played by the LP themselves.