All this has been happening under the regime of an unelected president, who has been called "evil" by no less than a key member of her Cabinet. For over seven long years now, she has been wielding illegitimately acquired executive powers with impunity, rampantly violating the sacred Constitution, the Rule of Law and other civil liberties of the Filipino people. And with her ever loyal generals and police and military minions standing behind her throne, she has been ruling our country with an iron hand.

She has escaped impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives whose members have been corrupted by lucre and perks oozing out of the Palace along the murky Pasig River. She has tried, but failed, to impede the independent-minded senators of the land from conducting inquiries into cases of corruption and other anomalies and irregularities in her government, particularly the scandalous national broadband project of the Chinese corporation ZTE.

The principal allegation under investigation by three Senate committees led by the Blue Ribbon Committee is that the obviously inflated price of the project is a result of a new, shameless level of official corruption. And when suspicions converged on the First Spouse and some of Arroyo's key officials, as revealed by star witness Jun Lozada, she literally moved heaven and earth to stop the Senate probe, as we all have watched in utter dismay for many, many months.

Oh, by the way, Jun Lozada was the one who had quoted another witness, his friend Romulo Neri, former director-general of the National Economic Development Authority, as saying that Gloria Arroyo "is evil." This was soon followed by Gloria's order to Neri not to answer questions of the senators regarding his conversations with her about the $329 million ZTE-NBN contract. Quickly, Neri quickly hid behind the cloak of executive privilege to withhold information about the deal. This became a legal issue when it was elevated to the high tribunal by Neri. He was upheld by nine justices, all Arroyo appointees, including one who has hardly warmed his chair in the hall of justice.

But six other associate justices, led by Chief Justice Renato Puno, oppugned the majority decision. In 120-page dissenting opinion, Puno wrote that the three questions the senators wanted Neri to answer -- namely, whether Ms. Arroyo followed up the ZTE-NBN project even after he had informed her of a bribe offered by a key official involved in the deal, whether she directed him to give it priority and whether she ordered him to approve the project - were not covered by the Executive privilege invoked by Neri. Nevertheless, Neri may still be summoned to the Senate inquiry to answer other questions about the controversial contract.

The questionable ZTE-NBN deal is actually one of the alarming cases of corruption which have been documented and surveyed by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC). It found the Philippines to be the "most corrupt" country in Asia.

Surely, this one of innumerable reasons why, as shown by the newest of public surveys, the great majority of Filipinos do not approve of Gloria's performance in office and don't trust her a bit.

According to the results of the national survey conducted by the Pulse Asia, one of every two Filipinos disapproved of her performance as president, while three of every five distrusted her. Her highest disapproval rating of 71 percent and distrust rating of 76th were in Metro Manila, and she registered disapproval ratings of 49 percent to 71 percent across all geographic areas and socio-economic classes.

In the face of all these damming results of the surveys of the Pulse Asia and PERC, Gloria Arroyo continues to pretend that corruption is not a cancer eating away at the body politic. And yet, in the same breath, she boasted to put an end to corruption in her government before the end of her term in 2010.