Hunter’s Moon, as the October 2024 supermoon is called, was not propitious to Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio as she tried to deliver her philippics against her former partner-in-politics President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., airing her grievances and her unfulfilled desire to chop off his head for a strange reason, exhume the body of his dictator-father and throw the remains into the West Philippine Sea (WPS.) The capstone in the pyramid of her grievances was that Marcos Jr. is unfit to be president of this benighted country. In short, she should take over.
This has been the tortured argument why Sara and the Dutertes and the foreign power funding them have been engaged since last year in the covert operation that called for the ouster of Marcos Jr., not because he is lazy, a mere partygoer and lacks the essential qualities of a national leader. It takes one to know one. Rep. Elizaldy Co described Sara as “waldas at lakwatsa,” barely going to her office but quick to watch Taylor Swift concerts in Germany as a supertyphoon battered Luzon on July 24, 2024. Yet, as the facts gathered by the congressional panel investigating the financial anomalies at the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) showed, she splurged on P125 million of the OVP budget “borrowed” from the Contingent Fund (CF) of the Office of the President (OP.)
Sara’s soliloquy came as the Commission on Audit (COA) found that she had used 34 “safehouses” in 2022, spent P1 million for one safehouse in four days, and paid P8.95 million for other “safehouses” used for only three days. Military officers and police officials must be scratching their heads over this weird expense. Luxurious suites do not qualify as safehouses for spooks, witnesses, and informants. From all appearances, Sara’s anti-Bongbong philippics were meant to divert the issue as she played the victim card. She’s a bad poker player as people watching her speak from her bully pulpit found her mouthing bad air. It’s like a skunk telling a possum that he’s got bad breath.
Her tortured attempt at squirreling away from investigations only intensified her war with lawmakers. By not responding to her attacks, Malacanang dismissed her as a mere annoyance not worth a response. Yet, Sara has been obsessed with the presidency, and the posters of her zealots asking her to replace Marcos Jr. prove that there are moves to kick him out and crown Sara as the new president. Her fury apparently started in the dying days of 2022, when she asked for her share of confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) to secure 10 satellite offices nationwide. The money she had cadged from Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin was not pork barrel and she is accountable for it down to the last centavo.
Sara’s behavior can be assessed by clinical psychologists like Dr. Natalia Dayan, who analyzed her father Rodrigo Duterte as a court-appointed psychiatrist in the annulment case filed by his wife, Elizabeth Zimmerman Duterte. Dr. Dayan’s findings led to the court victory of Elizabeth as the Pasay City judge found him incapable of performing his matrimonial duties and managing his own family since he had been womanizer. Dr. Dayan may still be available to interview Sara and the other Duterte children. The country should be interested in knowing that their leaders are not cognitively impaired, are not malignant narcissists and are not sociopaths.
Raging at Marcos Jr., Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez and others in her monologue did not clear up the mess about her safehouses or her splurging P15 million for the counter-insurgency Youth Leadership Summit (YLS) conducted by the Philippine Army (PA.) Military officers told lawmakers they would not have issued a certification to Sara had they known it would be used to justify such a huge expense for the YLS. The army and LGUs bankrolled the YLS, not the OVP. In her defense, Sara said that billions of pesos are released and used by the government in a day. Thus, her expenditures should not be questioned, which means doing away with congressional budget hearings, abolishing the COA, and scrapping the anti-graft and plunder laws. Sara thinks she is more equal than others. Remember her favorite quip? Honesty is not needed in politics.
With her royal mindset, it is impossible for any democratic process to cover her OVP and the absence of key officials from her principality during the budget hearings means Sara ignores the legislature. In her weird castle in the air, she is both the spirit and letter of the law. She argues that the documents she had submitted to Congress would suffice without any questions raised. Documents do not talk and cannot explain anything. Acknowledgment receipts are not official receipts, and taxpayers demand that she account for her bogus expenses at the OVP, from rentals to “rewards” that include food, medicines, “other products” and office equipment. This “reward in kind” scheme is the giveaway, along with fictitious expenditure for YLS, and the millions of pesos spent for ritzy “safehouses” betray a pathological obsession with deluding the people.
Gabriela party-list Rep. Arlene Brosas and the Makabayan Coalition, long the target of Sara, said the OVP was deflecting and conducting a teledrama to avoid being questioned and asked to explain where the people’s money went. “We are appalled by the recent diversionary tactics employed by Vice President Sara Duterte amid serious allegations of misuse of public funds and corruption within the Department of Education (DepEd.) This is merely a deliberate attempt to shift public attention through a tell-all interview on her relationship with the Marcos family — a narrative that serves no purpose in addressing the pressing issues at hand,” Brosas said. “Hindi ito Maalaala Mo Kaya episode,” Brosas said, referring to the TV show where letter-senders narrate their life stories. “Vice President Duterte’s reluctance to face these corruption allegations head-on, coupled with her theatrics, is a desperate bid to save face.” Like a cornered sewer rat, Duterte dismissed the facts uncovered by the hearings as a lot of crap that never proved the allegations against her. Her grand finale was straight from Saint Saens’s “Carnival of the Animals”: Her detractors only wanted to sully her reputation and ruin the public’s good perception of her. She’s one egg short of an omelet, as Americans would say.
