by Diego Morra
The impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio has become a big show of how some senators apparently are confused about their role as members of the Senate court, which explains why they have been trying, vainly as it is, to reduce the impact of Saras’s self-inflicted wounds, ranging from admitting to making the death threats to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his wife and ex-Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez and threatening to exhume the remains of ex-president to throw the same into the South China Sea (SCS) to impress her Chinese friends.
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano and sister Sen. Pia Cayetano are committing a disservice to the Senate by claiming that Marcos Jr.’s fear that he would be assassinated is practically an admission of his committing conduct unbecoming of a President. It is a justification for Sara’s death threats, a fallacy that comes from thinking with the knee. The “ambassador of Christ,” as he falsely describes himself, thus rationalizes criminal conduct, all because the mindless Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio herself doesn’t understand what she is doing. Alan has become a pathetic sight at the Senate and the Michigan-born Pia fares just as worse.
Add Sen. Robinhood Padilla’s questioning of the witness about Islam, which is irrelevant, and casting aspersions on the top NBI investigator and you some comic relief during the proceedings. Senate observers noted that the Cayetanos and Padilla, as if on cue, or some nudging from the Sara camp, suddenly awoke from their slumber and trained their guns on the prosecution, which made mincemeat of the sophomoric entreaties of the defense counsel. They are serving the best interest of Sara, who has admitted the facticity of the death threats by issuing a risible but blanket denial of the November 23, 2024 witching hour death threats-cum-press conference.
She admitted making the threats and bragging about it by widely disseminating the video footage. Now the bipolar in her denies committing the basic elements of the crime. Is she sane? Why can’t Malou Tiquia and the hundreds of Sara consultants repair her cognitive structures? Sara’s July 14. 2026 statement doesn’t erase the death threats she had issued on Nov. 23, 2024. Curiously, it was on November 23, 1963 when US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Some criminal mind must be at work at the Sara camp. It has been adequately proven by Sara that she cannot string three intelligible English sentences together and labors immensely in speaking extemporaneously aside from plagiarizing Henley’s “Invictus,” plagiarizing the picture book of a New York author, and putting Jose Rizal’s words into Andres Bonifacio’s mouth. She isn’t a stable genius like Donald Trump but a vicious power-hungry nepo baby who thinks Yahweh has groomed her to be President of this country.
By failing to destroy the testimonies of two NBI expert witnesses, the Cayetanos and Padilla are trying to create irrelevant issues, deflect public attention from the facts, the timeline and the incontrovertible pieces of evidence that prove the veracity of Sara’s threats. Worse, she is the sole beneficiary of any Marcos assassination. In fact, she wishes it to happen, judging by the deliberate break she initiated with her own political coalition with the Marcoses, her prolonged intrigue against Romualdez, who was her campaign manager in 2022, and her demand since early 2022 for Marcos Jr. to resign.
Even with her 80% grade in the bar examination, Sara has failed to show that she can hack it at the impeachment court. In fact, she dreads taking the oath and being put on the dock to be grilled by private prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan, who practically schooled the 16-member Sara defense panel on procedures, evidentiary proof and how projection, as in the case of the Operation Romanov “plot” to massacre the Duterte political dynasty, will ultimately be debunked. Lies have no probative value. Yet Sara is notorious for lying, dishonesty and betrayal. She demanded the defense portfolio and got ignored since she was obviously incompetent to handle the job. She sought 24-hour access to choppers and jets but this was rejected. Appointed to head the DepEd, she bungled it.
Since the entire nation is no longer entertained by the botched Sara defense, the Duterte camp is now attempting to use survey results, no doubt produced through curb stoning to show that Sara has the highest approval rating, as if such rating has anything to do with her impeachment trial or the evidence produced thus far that prove her issuing death threats against the Marcoses. These irrelevant surveys do not prove that Sara is working as a vice president rather than gallivanting in Europe and watching Taylor Swift concerts while Filipinos drown in floods and lose their livelihoods and properties. In fact, the issues she faces range from plunder to fiscal mismanagement, bribery and others. These are performance issues that surveys do not ask. Wait until Malou Tiquia and company follow the lead of Trump by saying Sara has 1,000% support.
If the senators standing in judgment of Sara were to be true to their oaths, they would wean away the grain from the chaff and weigh the evidence, examine documents and find out that Sara committed the worst crimes against the national leadership, plundered the OVP and DepEd budgets, wrecked the educational system by her indolence and incompetence and misused P612.5-million in confidential funds to which she was not entitled under the 2022 national budget since the appropriations for the final year of Vice President Leni Robredo did not contain a single centavo of such funds. The pattern of financial abuse is so clear that the COA ordered her to return the money. But then private expropriation of public funds is the hallmark of the Dutertes. On Article 4 alone of the impeachment, Sara has been weighed and found wanting. The writing is on the wall. #
