Try as she might, Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio cannot win the argument that she is being targeted by the Marcos Jr. administration for sustained harassment, and she would not even tag who is masterminding the campaign to send her to the political doghouse.
This month alone, the designated survivor boycotted the third State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., officially quit her education portfolio on July 19, left for Germany to watch a Taylor Swift concert along with her family on July 24 and missed the wrath of Typhoon Carina on the same day. She was justly skewered for being absent when disaster struck, and hundreds of thousands of typhoon victims would not forget that. Earlier, she announced that her father, ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, would run for the Senate in 2025, along with her brothers Rep. Apollo Duterte and Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte. Her announcement, tagged as silly by political operatives, was later shot down by the ex-president.
Previously, Sara persistently jabbed the “Tambaluslos” of the regime as the one unravelling the unity that was cobbled together by the Marcos political dynasty in the North and the Duterte political dynasty in the South, the Arroyo dynasty in Pampanga and Negros Occidental and the Villar political dynasty of Las Pinas. Other dynasties pitched in, of course, and they hammered out a digitally-designed victory in May 2022. The unity envisioned became a flash in the pan as within a year, Team Unity was shredded by the bickering between Sara and Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, the President’s cousin, largely ignited by a failed power grab at the House of Representatives and the demotion of ex-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
So, Romualdez became “Tambaluslos,” a mythical Austronesian forest creature with a huge junk who terrorizes women, a nasty description coming from a daughter of a man who was mighty proud of his putz at the YMCA in Manila where he resided, as if its size is equivalent to his wisdom and intelligence. The moniker has gained traction only among the Duterte diehards but is despised elsewhere. It is a case of literally hitting below the belt, and the derogatory description has been tagged as the reason why the Office of the Vice President (OVP) lost its much-desired P500-million Confidential and Intelligence Fund (CIF) and the smaller P150-million CIF for the Department of Education (DepEd.) Sara forgot that Batasang Pambansa still holds the power of the purse, and Romualdez holds the key to that very big purse.
Now, the OVP has zero CIF just as former Vice President Leni Robredo did not enjoy a single red cent of the CIF in all of her six years in office. DepEd also has zero CIF as the department should not be in the business of protecting pupils from the imagined depredations of guerrillas lurking in every classroom. Did Sara like the idea of zero CIF for her twin offices? No. She even tagged ACT Teachers Rep. France Castro as an “enemy of the state” for exposing the P221.424-million that she got from the Palace in the final 11 days of 2022. Sara, a military reserve officer, also quit as vice chairman of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NRF-ELCAC.)
Sara did not earn plaudits for her failure to defend the budgets of the OVP and DepEd, relying instead on her reliable like Atty. Zuleika Lopez to do the yeoman’s job of explaining to Congress why her twin offices deserve billions. It was just like watching Sen. Bong Go being interpellated at the Senate, with him standing beside his adviser who answers questions for him. Advisers, of course, are not elected. Thus, Go has to defend legislative proposals while Sara is compelled to defend her departmental budget.
So let us return to our sheep. Being elected to lofty offices does not bestow anyone the right to demand the budget she must have, the number of her bodyguards, the locations of her satellite offices and access to billions of CIF. A little humility should have earned Sara the respect she deserves but earning more enemies due to the Tambaluslos moniker is one way of derailing her train to 2028. Thanks to her tantrums, she lost the CIF, she quit from DepEd and NTF-ELCAC, resigned from her political party and gave Romualdez the opportunity to cast a wide net and capture a broader political coalition for 2028 in the event that he runs for President.
Sara may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but she could have kept quiet while counting her marbles and winning more allies in the rough-and-tumble world of politics, in which people crap in their beds and roll around their sheets rather than changing their sheets. Seriously, no one remembers anything outstanding that Sara accomplished at DepEd and OVP aside from howling about political harassment when 75 policemen were pulled out from her security detail. Political harassment is boilerplate language. Show the receipts or magically produce them on the fly but never rely on jabronis on the loose to defend you.
