Former president Rodrigo Duterte is a loudmouth and the more he talks, the more the drifts from reality and fetishizes that his stream-of-consciousness babbling would influence his thinning audience that he talks sense and dispenses the truth like an ATM. Like his idol Donald Trump, Duterte is a malignant anti-social narcissist, as what a court-appointed psychiatrist testified in a Pasay City court decades ago.
After he chickened out of a duel with broadcaster Waldy Carbonell in 2003, Davao City mediamen laughed themselves hoarse, insisting that rather than facing sure death, Duterte flew to Taiwan. Carbonell, who was sent by then National Press Club of the Philippines (NPC) president Tony Antonio to Davao City to investigate the murder of commentator Jun Pala but Duterte threatened to “kill” and bury him standing on his feet six feet underground. Carbonell’s head will stick out the soil as he is six-foot-three inches tall. The verdict was out: Duterte’s “maisug” trait evaporated one fine morning.
Now, it is former senator Leila de Lima’s turn to tag Duterte as an unrepentant coward in an interview with Vera Files. On June 30, Duterte delivered yet another lie-filled, illogical speech to those who tried to listen and admonished de Lima to just keep her mouth shut after she won the dismissals of all the cases lodged against her by Duterte’s Department of Justice (DOJ.) The tormentor wants his victim to keep her mouth shut after he lost catastrophically in attempting to punish his prey in three courts of law. Duterte wants his lawlessness to reign supreme after he made injustice to the cornerstone of his administration.
In one hilarious turn. Duterte claimed he was not de Lima’s jailer for seven years. Yet, the charges filed against de Lima had the fingerprints of Duterte, like the losing cases he had filed as a fiscal in Davao City. De Lima’s mistake was that she exposed Duterte’s bloody hand in the summary executions that had bloodied the city’s history, telling him to do something about the killings since he is mandated by law to protect human rights. That is like telling the fox to quiz the slaughter in the henhouse or asking the butchers what had happened at the pigpen.
As the Carbonell episode showed 21 years ago, Duterte was a coward who preferred the barber shops of Taiwan than honor his dare to shoot it out with Carbonell at 9 a.m. Carbonell came ready for the fight with his automatic pistol. No one could confirm that Duterte was prepared to use his twat and tackle in a fight to the death. De Lima now corroborates Carbonell’s statement that you can’t engage in a shootout with zombies, but you can be outtalked by a man who has had diarrhea of the mouth since birth.
There is actually no need for de Lima to put out a soap box or stage in every plaza to denounce Duterte but it is within her right to come back hard on the unlamented ex-president by suing him for malicious prosecution, along with the senators, congressmen and DOJ bureaucrats and the freelancing social media trolls and crones and “hao siao” jukeboxes in the press. Those senators and congressmen who maligned her using “sex videos” and the manufactured testimonies of Muntinlupa convicts who died one by one also deserve their day in court, like any dog suffering from mange.
“He should stop threatening me and he must know by now that I am beyond being threatened by him. Pinatunayan ko na po iyan,” told Tress Martelino-Reyes in the Tres from Tress podcast of VERA Files on July 3, 2024. “Wag kang sumobra kasi pag lumabas ‘yon ulit, lalo ka lang babaon. Do not tempt the Gods. Find your peace, where you are now. ‘Wag kang kumalikot ng away kasi pagsisihan mo yan,” warned Duterte, who failed to win not a single case of the manufactured cases that his blagging, fumbling prosecutors had filed. “Tinatakot na naman niya ako na alam naman niya na hindi ako takot sa kanya. Alam niya ‘yun. Alam ko duwag siya,” de Lima shot back.
Another official who narrated what abuse of power means in Davao City was the recently-departed Gen. Ramon Montano, who stripped Duterte of his police bodyguards in 1987 upon receiving complaints and verified reports that Duterte had been using his security detail to harass his political enemies. Duterte flew to Manila to plead with Montano to recall the order. Montano told him curtly that he was abusive and must not use members of the then PC-Integrated National Police (PC-INP) to intimidate his political rivals. The order was recalled later by higher authorities. Years later, Duterte had his own private army comprised of some renegades, moonlighting police officers and hooligans loyal to him. Thus, the acronym DDS for Duterte Death Squad.
