My thoughts were: "Wasn’t he president of a very small entity in the government – the Philippine Forest Products Corp. – and didn’t he give all sorts of breaks to his wife, siblings and friends and here he is talking about what he would do if he were President of this country?"

Ang kapal!

I mean, when are we going to wake up that this is not the messenger of God but someone sent by Satan! If he could do what he is saying he would do if he were president of the country why didn’t he do it when he had such a small part of our resources? What a man does with what he is given does not change just because he is given a larger job. Why do some of you think that J. Lo might make a good senator or even a good president? Come on, be real. Give a petty crook a big job and he will become a big crook. That is the way it works. There is nothing in between.

When will we learn that supporting someone just because that someone says something bad about a person we hate even when what he says turns out to be a total lie does not work out to our benefit?

How many of you voted Alan Peter Cayetano into the Senate because he accused Mike Arroyo of having accounts with a German bank, an accusation that was easily disproved by the bank itself? Still, we voted Congressman Alan Peter Cayetano into the Senate where he was given the Blue Ribbon committee. Has he investigated his own accusation against the First Gentleman or has he conveniently forgotten that? Was this all a trick to get us to vote him into the Senate? Are his voters all perfect fools? Will Alan Peter Cayetano’s voters now also vote J. Lo into our Senate, the better to bring down the over-all quality of our senators?

I am sorry to be so unforgiving but really, what are we doing to ourselves? Voting with our hurts, we are bringing down the quality of the people who serve us. This is not the way it should be. We ought to be voting people into government who can serve us well, not those who are crooks who seem to have a temporary salve for what is hurting us at the movement. Given the right mix, Chavit Singson might even have won.

What is the difference between Chavit and J. Lo? Not really much. Both told tall tales. Because Chavit told on someone we loved, we did not elect him (although the priests and the nuns and Cardinal Sin gave Chavit their time and their full support and thus made our lives worse just as J. Lo now has their full support).

Why follow the Church when it comes to political decisions? It has been wrong more often than right. Most priests and nuns do not understand politics. They are easily taken in by the Chavits, J. Los and Dante Ms of this world. Although they try to serve Jesus, most of them cannot distinguish who is the good thief amongst the Dimases and Gestases of this world. When Jesus said on the cross to the good thief: "This day you will be with me in Paradise," he did so because he saw contrition in the good thief’s heart.

In the present case, we are being taken for a ride by someone who hopes to actually end up becoming president. When that happens, watch out, world. The Philippines would have become the armpit of this earth and a totally corrupt nation.

***

Our senators holding overextended public hearings on the scuttled national broadband network project (NBN) project have betrayed their hunger for media mileage and publicity. The inclination by some senators to mouth Lozada’s "bukol" and Madriaga’s "tongpats" every chance they get exposes their lack of imagination and the lack of a true desire to get to the bottom of things.

On the 12th episode of the NBN telenovela, Senator Panfilo Lacson came up with his surprise witness and got the shock of his life. Ping was surprised by his surprise witness.

While Lacson tried to discredit or impeach his own witness, Leo San Miguel survived heavy grilling by hostile senators like Lacson, Jamby Madrigal, Mar Roxas and Kiko Pangilinan.

Dared by Roxas to undergo a lie detector test on his dismissal of Madriaga’s claim that bribery attended the NBN project, San Miguel replied: "Anytime."

Belatedly, Madriaga, Lozada and losing NBN proponent Jose de Venecia III also agreed to take the polygraph test.

Come to think of it, San Miguel only had to deny saying everything that Madriaga claimed he (San Miguel) had said. This is because Madriaga’s previous NBN testimony was pure hearsay.

Madriaga’s claim was that his boss, San Miguel, told him of tens of millions in US dollars being paid as NBN bribe money to a group of Filipinos, including San Miguel.

Since this was a case of "he said, I heard him say," San Miguel’s denying Madriaga’s claims should have been enough. But, of course, it wasn’t.

Remember that the German bank’s denial of the existence of the Cayetano-generated account for the FG was not enough to convince voters not to vote Alan Peter into the Senate.

The problem with many senators’ appreciation of what the truth is may be that even before they begin their search for the truth, they have already made up their mind as to what it is. Thus, Madrigal, Lacson, Cayetano and Pangilinan saw red when San Miguel’s version of the truth did not hew to what they had previously decided on as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

For the good of the country, what the Senate and the House should be working on are the territorial boundaries of the country under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

What is expected of us is to indicate the boundary markers (mohon in Tagalog which, however, translates badly into Spanish) of our territory. Then we will discuss this in the United Nations like civilized nations.

We have to finish this by sometime in 2009. Or else we will have to go by what our neighbors China, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia say are their boundaries. What is left after they have carved up the China Sea will be Philippine territory. That will not be much.

Please do your jobs as senators of this Republic first before that of being overly ambitious politicos!