This has been brewing in my brain for the past few weeks. If the quick and absolute removal of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is the goal, why not just kill her?
As MLQ3 writes:
The only checkmate on the President is impeachment, not the official end of her term; for her term expiring is at best, a moveable goal-post (create a new job, and the expiration of your term isn’t consequential; retiring isn’t a problem if besides an obliging Ombudsman and a friendly Supreme Court, you have a new President you swung the election to). Only impeachment means sudden death, politically. And things can happen very fast, when people see a check mate unfolding, for capitalizing on it requires only a committed and nimble minority with its eye on the prize.
On the contrary, the only real checkmate on the President (on any head of state for that matter) is assassination. Kill the damned bitch and get it over with. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s on a lot of people’s minds anyway since there no longer seems to be any interest in strengthening democratic institutions. People like Doronila speak of the Presidency as a prize to be “captured;” and the great Manuel L. Quezon’s grandson’s view on the matter seemingly (and ironically) trivializes the expiration of the president’s term, ergo, trivializing also the necessity for an orderly transfer of power through democratic means. The presidency, therefore, is no longer for the people to bestow on a pretender, but a crown whose resting place of the moment is determined by the new nobility. Monarchists would be proud.
Is this really the kind of impatience with the long ways of democracy and republicanism that we want to teach future generations? Do we want to teach future generations that democratic institutions can be dispensed with because they can’t be trusted anyway? Well, how can they ever become trusted when we tear them down whenever we feel we’re not getting the results we want? Is this the way to build up our democracy?
MLQ3, with his children’s crusade, seems to think so. I’ve no reason to doubt his patriotism, but his methods leave me cold. Down the road he has chosen you can foresee only more of the same. I think he does too. I think they all do. Which is probably why no one has yet advocated regicide. Kill a king and you have to be ready, when you’re in power, to live under the same sword and at the mercy of the same strand of horsehair.
Seven Million Golden Fish 