Philippine society elite ridicule Vice President Sara Duterte’s Visayan accent

Remember how the ouster of former President Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada was engineered by the Yellowidiots led by former presidents Fidel ‘Tabako’ Ramos and Cory Aquino in 2001? Then when former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) and Cory got into a tiff over Hacienda Luisita, the Yellowidiots turned against GMA and began a demolition job on her for the rest of her term. When Noynoy Aquino won the presidency in 2010, his first order of business was to lock her up at Veterans Memorial Hospital.

We see now that every lever is being similarly pulled to cast Vice President Sara Duterte as an object to launch a hundred administrative and “activist” movements against. Even the trivial is not spared as is evident in how the media now amplify “viral” mockery of the VP’s Visayan accent in this latest example of lazy “journalism”, “‘Shimenet’: The new term going viral online” published by the Philippine Star to capitalise on a snippet taken from Duterte’s response she gave during an ongoing budget hearing…

“Everyone has the right to know about these. It’s a matter of public interest. We are asking for transparency and accountability,” Brosas said.

The vice president responded, “She may not like my answer. She may not like how I answer. She may not like the content of my answer, but I am answering.”

However, Filipinos noticed that Duterte’s pronunciation of “she may not” sounded like “shimenet,” and that spawned dozens of memes and humorous edits online.

In what is but the most recent example of dishonest news “reporting” where “journalists” cherry-pick social media posts to bolster their preferred narrative, author Kristofer Purnell exhibits the gold nugget of this “report” citing a post on the subject issued by award-winning international starlet Dolly de Leon on X. Evidently, de Leon too found it funny.

Doesn’t this sound familiar because history seems to be repeating itself with the Marcoses and the Dutertes? What’s happening now in the Philippines isn’t only a political battle but also a class war. Former President Rodrigo Duterte is the promdi who made it to the presidency in 2016 but his family didn’t make an effort to climb the ladder of Manila’s high society because they aren’t plastic. What’s happening now is simply the hypocrisy of their political enemies being exposed. The so-called fe buena familia Marcos, Araneta and Romualdez plus the pretending-to-be-concerned-for-the-poor cadre of leftist-militant bohemians.

I don’t know about you but to my mind, the administration of President Bongbong Marcos is just a repeat of the second Aquino administration. The two scions of the greatest rivals in Philippine politics are no different from each other. They’re cut from the same cloth. Worse is the fact that instead of leading an evolution into an issues-based public discourse, the two camps sustain and encourage all the traditional ad hominem attacks from the “influencers” of both camps the members of which suffer from an absence of intellectual depth. These morons target the masa, who prefer not to work, but instead wait for the ayuda to be handed down by politicians to them in exchange for votes.

When will the masa come to their senses and realize ginigisa lang sila sa sariling mantika nila? This is why we’re certainly headed for the dustbin of ASEAN. It’s not a question of if, but of when. We’re certainly headed in that direction.

Ramon Ortoll

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