By Diego Morra
There’s a new term that has evolved in the political firmament, and it applies not only to fascists, authoritarians and dictators, ranging from Donald Trump to the genocide artist of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu. However, the Philippines also has a worthy member of the PDS, which means Persons Deprived of Sanity (PDS), one who has become an alien to reality and a stranger to logic and common sense.
Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio is one such PDS, along with politicians who believe being a lawmaker is a license to earn huge commissions from the national kitty. Sara became PDS when she started to think like her father, an adjudicated malignant narcissist whom clinical psychologist Dr. Natalia Dayan described as anti-social and womanizer who cannot fulfill marital obligations and maintain a family. Tragically, the Dr. Dayan study, which became the basis for the annulment of the marriage of Rodrigo Duterte and Elizabeth Zimmerman by a Pasay Regional Trial Court (RTC) in the 1990s, never became public knowledge and did not prevent voters from having a better understanding why Duterte should never have been elected president in 2016.
There is no Philippine law that requires all candidates for elective posts to undergo psychiatric examinations to ensure that those elected would not be insane, demented or simply unfit to hold public office. There should be a law that compels all aspirants for elective positions to be rigorously examined, their honesty, sincerity and credibility put to serious test so that the voters would not regret the choices they have made. By their behavior, the Duterte children, from Sara, Apollo and Sebastian to their half-sister Veronica, also known as Kitty, have shown that they can lie, cheat and delude even the members of the Duterrte cult to promote their agenda, abetted in no small measure by their plus-size architects of disinformation and brand continuity, as if mass murder and plunder were moral. Malignant narcissism is not an inherited disorder, but apparently, the Duterte kids imbibed it by aping their father. Rodrigo wired their brains to follow his lead.
Sara’s macabre conduct before the Senate and the House of Representatives actually prompted former Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III to suggest that she should see a shrink. Sara failed to escape ridicule when she denied threatening her rivals and promoted the stupid theory about “conditional” threats, to the uproar of the general public. Yet, Sara is a firm believer in the wrong idea that any kind of publicity is desirable, including those that show her manhandling a Davao City court sheriff. Elder brother Rep. Apollo Duterte is no better as a footage also captured him beating his favorite entertainment manager In a Davao City bar for purportedly gypping a number of females who were recruited to entertain him and his Chinese businessmen-friends. To show just abusive and irrational Polong is, he “paid” his victim P1,000 for every slap, punch and kick that he received in the wee, small hours of the morning.
Now the acting Davao City mayor, Sebastian Duterte challenged Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Gen. Nicolas Torre III to a boxing match, to which Torre obliged, and even called the cop a “monkey” that he would batter black and blue. The dare ended up as shameless challenge as Sebastian flew the coop on the day of the boxing match, landing in Singapore (always the first stop of the Dutertes is the city known for harboring family offices handling the ill-gotten wealth of Asian gangsters) and saying that he had family matters to attend to. This is the same Baste whose videos show him looking addled and blabbering unintelligible word salads. He got lambasted for his disappearing trick, earning the Dutertes a new moniker—DACO—or Dutertes Always Chicken Out.
The youngest Duterte offspring, Kitty, not only figured badly during the March 11, 2025 arrest of his father by cursing then Brig. Gen. Nicolas Torre III, who led the lawmen who took Rodrigo in custody before shipping him off to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrested him and clapped him the decent, but spartan, detention cell of the Scheveningen Prison. Kitty lately acted as the dispenser of the lie that Rodrigo “was found” unconscious in his cell, doubling down on Sara’s false claim that the ICC was not providing his father with the best medical care while detained. The ICC is not incompetent or negligent in denying 24-hour monitoring of the elder Duterte. Its statement, belying Sara’s claim, is a classic since it did not tag her as a liar par excellence, but rather inferred that she was inventing stories.
Only one ICC detainee, former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, died while being held in The Hague because he refused medication and staged a hunger strike. Milosevic was accused of masterminding the Srebrenica massacre, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were gunned down by Serbian soldiers and paramilitary. Apparently, Sara and her siblings are creating a furor about the “mistreatment” of Rodrigo, a baseless allegation, and they are creating stories out of thin air to have a casus belli against the ICC. One other canard dished out by the Dutertes and their lawyers was that Rodrigo was permitted to secure interim release and several countries were competing to host him. This apocryphon has caused law experts to scratch their heads as the Dutertes want to make it appear that the tribunal trying Rodrigo is unjust, inhuman and illegally constituted.
Yet, it is impossible to counter zealots with logic as they have their own universe, with Sara vainly trying to unseat Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (they failed to mount a putsch on September 21, 2025 as retired military officers ignored their blandishments) and propagating the illusion that she will be president in 2028, and that the administration is completely off its rockers by establishing the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) tasked with finding out who stole P100-billion appropriated for flood control projects. Sara also savaged the reorganization of the House of Representatives and the Senate, both of which are not under her baton. Seriously, the Marcos Jr. administration’s feet should be held to the fire for failing to impeach and convict Sara, make her accountable for the P12 billion of the money she spent at the Department of Education (DepEd) that had been disallowed by the Commission on Audit (COA.) Or the P612.5 million that she wasted at the Office of the Vice President (OVP), the millions in reward money disbursed for fictitious informers, the millions expended for her three OVP extensions and 12 satellite offices. The empress has no clothes. And millions of Filipinos are wabbit due to her pettifoggery, legalistic nonsense, and plain stupidity.
