There's The Rub : Marcelino for President

By Conrado de Quiros
Columnist, Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: January 12, 2009

I REMEMBER reading a hilarious item in Traveler's Tales in the Far
Eastern Economic Review ages ago. It talked of a suit some traffic
cops in a small precinct in Bangkok filed against their superior.

For many years, the cops had been mulcting motorists and public
utility drivers over traffic infractions and had accumulated quite a
pile of loot. Alas, their chief hogged the money and would not share
it with them. Frustrated with efforts to persuade him to distribute
the spoils, and seeing themselves the victims of a terrible injustice,
the cops filed the suit.

The point of the story, a true one though quite an oddity, is that you
get used to malfeasance, you will no longer find anything wrong with
it. You will find the wrong elsewhere.

I remembered that story in light of Felisberto Verano saying there's
nothing wrong with writing the release order for the "Alabang boys" on
DOJ stationery and submitting it to Raul Gonzalez for signature.
Verano is astonishingly a lawyer for one of the accused and Gonzalez
is even more astonishingly the secretary of justice. The release order
is just a piece of paper, Verano says, it means nothing without
Gonzalez's signature. Now if he had forged Gonzalez's signature, that
would have been a crime.

The point of the story, a true one and no longer an oddity here, is
that you get used to malfeasance, you will no longer find anything
wrong with it. You will find the wrong elsewhere.

That applies not just to Verano but to Gonzalez. Gonzalez himself
found nothing wrong with the lawyer of one of the accused writing
things on DOJ paper. He took umbrage not with Verano but with
Ferdinand Marcelino who blew the whistle on state prosecutors dropping the case on the "Alabang boys" for a bountiful Christmas and a prosperous New Year. Gonzalez's beef was that Marcelino did not entrap the people who tried to bribe him too to be stricken blind.

The only explanation for it is that Gonzalez is used to seeing—and
signing—things written on DOJ paper for various purposes, from
ordering lunch from the canteen to springing the scions of rich kids
from jail. He'll always find the wrong elsewhere.

But thank God for Ferdinand Marcelino!

Thank God in the first place that he put Gonzalez in his place. Though
one is at pains to understand why he had to apologize afterward.
Everyone I know has the appropriate retort to Gonzalez's "Don't talk
to me like that!" None of it includes saying sorry.

Thank God in the second place that Marcelino's superiors in the PDEA and his "mistahs" in the AFP, including the retired generals, are backing him up full force. Even if I suspect many of them are doing so in the hope that his sheen of idealism will rub off on them, if not indeed blind the world by its dazzling brilliance to their own part in spreading the darkness. I completely endorse Rodolfo Biazon's plan for the Senate to commend Marcelino and for the AFP to award Marcelino the Distinguished Service Star, the highest non-combat award to a soldier.

The latter is not inferior to the combat award, it is superior to it.
I've always thought, and said, that moral courage was by far the
greater form of courage than the physical one. It is so much harder to
show.

At a time when perfidy and wrongdoing rule the day, proof daily being offered of the innocent being punished and the guilty rewarded, of the good being damned and the bad praised to high heavens, Marcelino's honesty shines through. Particularly as he showed it amid the greatest adversity, losing as he did a kin to cancer from destitution. He did not refuse the bribe because it would bring admiration from his peers; many of them probably thought him stupid for it. He did it, as he himself puts it simply, because it was the right thing to do.

I myself have a couple of recommendations.

One is to appoint Marcelino posthaste as Ombudsman. And have him
investigate Merceditas Gutierrez for all sorts of crimes and
misdemeanors. It's the only way that office will ever get to do the
job it is meant to do, Marcelino having shown he is one of the few
public officials who can do the job they are meant to do.

The second, completely seriously, is to put the Office of the
Ombudsman under the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. The reason for this is simple. There is a drug that addles the brain more thoroughly than Ecstasy, Ecstasy only giving its user to feel the pangs of love or lust. There is a drug that sends people on longer and farther power trips than shabu, shabu only lasting a few days and rendering their users impotent afterward. There is a drug that is far more addictive than heroin, no amount of rehabilitation being able to cure it.

That drug is corruption.

Corruption is the most dangerous drug of all in this country. It gives
the user to feel not only the pangs of lust or love of money; it sends
the user to longer and farther power trips, making them feel like they
deserve to rule forever; it is the most addictive drug of all, and
one, quite unfortunately, that does not kill the user, only everyone
around him, or her.

It is no small irony—indeed it is a sublimely poetic one—that
Marcelino set out to take on drug pushers and users and ended up
taking on the justice department. They are one and the same. The
justice department is the biggest pusher of the most dangerous drug in this country, or the biggest supplier of it to its biggest user in the country, to be found in the Palace by the Pasig. At the very least, you can't have a brain more addled by drugs—in more ways than one—than Gonzalez's. And you can't have veins more addicted to constant injections of power than those of his boss.

What can I say? Never mind Ombudsman, Marcelino for president.