All the dirty laundry of her administration in the last six years – the lies, the cheatings, the insidious conspiracies, the blatant deception, the corruption in high places, et cetera, et cetera – will be hanging in the air for the entire world to see. And consequently, this would fan what seemed to be the dying embers of the issue of her presidential legitimacy into a raging political fire once again!

That’s precisely what the reopening by the Senate Committee of the Whole of those electoral frauds would surely do to her. It was Senator Panfilo Lacson who triggered it off by his presentation of the video-taped testimony of a military intelligence operative. The witness revealed that he taped the incriminating conversation between Gloria and then Election Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano alias "Garci" or "Gary" that led to the changing of the outcome of the 2004 presidential election in Gloria’s favor.

Just like the time when it first came to light, Malacañang once more invoked Gloria’s Executive Order 464 to block the congressional investigation of the poll frauds. It is the same diktat of Gloria that they are now waving to stop her key officials from testifying this time before the Senate probers.

Yes, the very same presidential ukase that the Supreme Court had shot down as unquestionably unconstitutional. And this time no less than Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago said the constitutionally of that order has been placed "under a cloud of doubt"! This is simply amazing, coming as it does from one who’s known ally of the beleaguered Arroyo administration. And she even twisted her verbal stiletto when she pointed out that it could mean that "there is something wrong when the person is trying to hide."

Unlike the fiery lady solon, young Senator Francis Escudero raised the level of criticism by simply cautioning the Palace from invoking that executive order or resurrecting it through "Memorandum 108." Otherwise, the freshman senator, who placed second in the last May’s mid-term election, said it could lead to a constitutional crisis.

Such a crisis, indeed, could very well arise if the Palace restricts the appearance of key executive officials and military officers before the Senate. Something similar happened recently in Washington, D.C. when the Bush administration tried to stop White House and other key executives and military strategists from testifying before the US Senate about George W. Bush’s Iraq War. The same reasons, incidentally, he gave were also invoked by Gloria M. Arroyo. That matters involving state secrets and national security cannot be the subject of Senate investigation. Bush didn’t succeed. The same fate may await Gloria.

Obviously to forestall such a devastating event from happening, Gloria Arroyo went through the motions of being busy attending to pressing problems such as the peace and order situation in Mindanao and Sulu. "I have a country to run," she said, arrogantly. "I have terrorists to fight. I have a peace to win." And in a flash, her Palace mouthpieces lost no time in showing photographs of their Big Boss visiting her soldiers in the "war zone" and at the same time calling on the senators to do their jobs, too, by attending to the passage of legislative measures for the public welfare, and so on and on.

But such gimmickry won’t work. Her political critics in the halls of Congress and in media sectors won’t let her go that easily. Already, they have likened Gloria’s attempt to gag her executives and military minions and prevent them from appearing before the Senate Committee of the Whole to the code of silence or "omerta" of the notorious Mafia. The imaginative metaphor, a bit caustic, was used by the fighting Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay of the United Opposition. And, grinning from ear to ear, he said, "There’s nothing demeaning or shameful in telling the truth about the "Hello Garci" tape and other scandals…"

The truth? From her first years inside Malacanang, Gloria Arroyo has mugged the truth, deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly to advance her obsessive hunger for power. She has lied large and small. She has lied directly and by omission. That’s why any appeal to her to ferret out the truth will be met by silence, in the fashion that she has dictated her officials to observe her own code of silence.

Nobody, but nobody, believes Gloria even when she professed fealty to unity and civility, something that she has been doing from the start of her purloined presidency to this very day, acts which have been revealed as lies. Her claim to be a "unifier-not-a-divider" was and is worthless!

In the hope that Gloria Arroyo will no longer embrace all her slipperiness with the truth about the "Hello Garci" tapes and other scandals, let us commend to her the wise and undying words of St. Augustine: