Inquirer’s Neal Cruz likens living under Aquino Government to life in prison

Let’s not get too caught up in analogies so much lest we come across looking like an idiot.

Take this moronism from Inquirer.net columnist Neal Cruz…

If you were the warden of a prison and you suspect that some prisoners are planning to escape, won’t you take precautions? Will you give the prisoners passes to see their doctors outside prison?

Of course, you won’t if you have any common sense left. They may not come back again.

This is the persuasion device used by Cruz to push his position on the whole brouhaha surrounding the sub-legal travel ban being imposed by Philippine Justice Secretary Leila De Lima on former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who is requesting that she be allowed to seek medical treatment abroad.

Cruz lectures us about “common sense” when the only conclusion one could walk away with after reading this most recent blurb of his is this:

Living in the Philippines under the management of the Malacañang of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III can be compared to living in prison.

That’s too bad. If that were so, most of us — the former President herself included — would technically have the option of suing for unlawful incarceration.

Perhaps this is the only bit of insight that could be gleaned from the work of this much-adored “columnist” that seems reasonable in light of the circus that has been unfolding over the last several days.

Other than that, Cruz quibbles on details that apply to the specific circumstances of the former President; things like her ability to easily afford to lose the 2 million peso bond required by the Supreme Court to be posted if she decides to pursue her overseas travel and a whole bunch of childish what-if scenarios surrounding her ability to periodically report to Philippine outposts abroad and the whatnots of whether a legal representative can effect any real summons on the Arroyos once they have left the country, both of the latter also conditions set by the SC when it granted Arroyo reprieve from De Lima’s travel ban.

Zzzzzzz….

Have I mentioned that Filipinos are world-renowned for their Heritage of Smallness yet?

Well, the thing with this much-adored heritage of ours is that it never fails to showcase itself whenever circuses like these are in town. The other day I cited an orgy of high-fives that ensued after the venerable “writer” Raissa Robles exposed in a blog article the triviality of a little loophole exploited in a certain Department Circular No. 41 issued by Justice Secretary Alberto Agra in 2010 under the Government of then President Arroyo. This circular is what the current Justice Secretary Leila De Lima then used to slap the travel ban on now former President and Congressman Arroyo.

In short, after the whole Demonise Arroyo campaign that has so far marked much of the Second Aquino Presidency and its mob, they end up rallying around a legal artefact that is, itself, a legacy of the very office they revile, just to make good on their “vision” to follow their “straight and narrow” path to Philippine bliss.

Ironies upon ironies, and all of them lost in Da Pinoy.

Lost on flawed analogies and quibbles over the infinitessimally relevant.

The thing with Filipinos and the celebrity “thought leaders” they look up to is that simple notions like these keep flying way above their little pointed heads. It becomes difficult to sift through the noise and identify the relevant, the concrete, and the coherent in a society where (1) people are too lazy to think and where, as a result, (2) people go for the easy way to digest issues, which is to lap up the ones presented with the most sugar-coating.

benign0

benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.