EDGEDAVAO
8 VANTAGE
EDITORIAL
H
On mudslinging
E may be out of the running for President, but Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte has still managed to open up the can of worms that politics is in the Philippines. A day after missing the deadline for the filing of certificates of candidacy (COCs) in which he was expected to file his for the presidency, Duterte trained his sights on presidential candidate Mar Roxas, who he said was behind a series of attacks several weeks ago focusing on the mayor’s health. To recall, a former journalist had written on his social media account that Duterte had throat cancer, a key detail that would have chiseled away the people’s confidence in their leader. Incensed, Duterte had fired back at the writer and accused him of being in the payroll of Roxas, noting that the same person had written about candidates Grace Poe and Jejomar Binay before -- but not about Roxas. Last Saturday Duterte repeated his accusation against Roxas, and in so doing he gave a glimpse of why he was reluctant to make a run for the presidency. Politics in the Philippines is a dirty proposition not just because those who are in it are corrupt but because they also tend to throw mud at each other in order to
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promote themselves. Roxas has publicly denied being behind the mudslinging against Duterte, but that does little to address the root of the problem. If it was not Roxas, then it was somebody else; either way, mud is being thrown around, and it debases the entire political exercise and brings it to levels that really have no place in a civilized society. This is probably the result of having a political system that stands not on ideas, principles, and platforms of government but on personalities. Save for a few candidates, most follow the same script in their campaigns: maka-Diyos, makabayan, makatao (God,country, people). They are unwilling to deviate from this because this is what the people want to hear from them. To a large extent, then, we the people are to blame for how campaigns are run in this country. We take hook, line and sinker the promises of each candidate to put God, country, and people first and proceed to watch as they entertain us with song and dance and as they attack each other on a personal and not ideological level. We have demanded so little of our candidates that they no longer even try to explain themselves; all it takes nowadays is to spread rumors about their opponents. ANTONIO M. AJERO Editor in Chief
NEILWIN JOSEPH L. BRAVO Managing Editor
AGAPITO JOAQUIN JR. Associate Editor
CHARLES RAYMOND A. MAXEY Consultant
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VOL. 8 ISSUE 144 • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2015
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