[Pastilan] Jimmy Bondoc’s dangerous reasoning

One cannot help wondering what the late senator Nene Pimentel would make of all this. The founder of the Partido Demokratiko Pilipino (PDP) would surely recoil at the thought that someone advancing arguments as morally bankrupt and intellectually contorted as these now serves as one of the party’s leaders. It is difficult to imagine a more thorough corruption of the principles upon which the party, later merged with Ninoy Aquino’s Laban, was founded. What began as a vehicle for democratic resistance during the Marcos dictatorship has been diminished into an instrument for excusing the very abuses it once existed to challenge. I say this as someone who had the privilege of knowing Nene personally: This decline in the PDP is the betrayal of a legacy. The remarks made this week by musician turned lawyer-politician Jimmy Bondoc, the present-day executive vice president of the bastardized PDP-Laban, explain why. They deserve attention, not because they are original — they are anything but — but because they provide a textbook example of how corruption is laundered into respectability. One need not deny the alleged offense. One need only redefine the standard by which it is judged. The result is an assertion that is insulting to the intelligence of anyone willing to examine it for more than a few seconds. More importantly, it reveals how corruption is defended in a democracy without ever having to be defended explicitly. Speaking in an interview with Boy Abunda, he said the impeachment is political as though he had unearthed a constitutional truth hidden from the rest of the Filipino race. He then argued that the allegations against Vice President Sara Duterte are nothing when set beside what he regards as the Marcos Jr. administration’s far greater sins, particularly over flood control spending. From this, he concluded that the attention devoted to the impeachment trial is disproportionate and that the proceedings themselves are all about partisan politics. (He omits one rather inconvenient fact. The Discayas themselves told a Senate inquiry that their flood control business took off when they began dealing with the Department of Public Works and Highways. That was in 2016, the same year Sara’s father Rodrigo ascended to the presidency.) The sleight of hand is subtle enough to sound persuasive until one notices what has actually happened. At no point does he say that the allegations against Sara are untrue. At no point does he contend that the evidence is insufficient or that the constitutional grounds for impeachment are absent. Instead, he invites the public to look elsewhere. This is among the oldest confidence tricks in politics. When the charge cannot be answered, when the facts are inconvenient, redirect attention to a larger scandal. In this way, accountability is quietly replaced by distraction, and corruption acquires an alibi without ever receiving a defense. The argument — if it even qualifies as such — has the appearance of common sense. Yet it is, in fact, intellectually bankrupt. To begin with, saying that impeachment is political proves nothing. Of course it is political. The Constitution assigns it to Congress. Elections are political. Budgets are political. Taxation is political. The declaration of war is political. To observe that impeachment is political is no more insightful than observing that a courtroom contains lawyers. It describes the setting while avoiding the question that actually matters: Has the impeached official committed acts that warrant conviction, removal from office, and perpetual disqualification from holding any position in government? The more serious failure comes next. In a way, he asks people to evaluate corruption not by whether it occurred, but by whether someone else committed a greater one. If another is accused of squandering vastly larger sums, then allegations involving around or over half a billion pesos somehow cease to deserve our concern. Notice what has happened. Without ever saying that corruption is acceptable, he has constructed a flawed argument in which corruption becomes increasingly acceptable as long as a larger scandal exists somewhere else. It is an extraordinary moral inversion. The standard is no longer innocence versus guilt. It is a smaller thief versus a larger thief. Going by this line of thinking, every corrupt official acquires an alibi simply by pointing upward. Every abuse of public trust becomes relatively harmless because someone else occupies a higher rung on the ladder of corruption. Accountability is transformed into an endless exercise in comparison, where justice must forever wait for the next, larger scandal. A society that reasons this way has already surrendered the concept of public accountability. The DDS absurdity becomes even clearer when viewed against recent history. It is worth remembering a fact that the selective amnesia of Philippine politics would prefer us to forget. Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte did not emerge from opposing moral universes. They emerged from the same campaign stage. In 2022, they traversed the country together, asking Filipinos to trust them under the Uniteam banner. They vouched for one another’s judgment, character, and fitness to govern. Each served as the other’s strongest character witness. What dissolved that partnership was not a sudden crisis of conscience. No road-to-Damascus-like conversion took place. No one awoke one morning gripped by the unbearable weight of ethical and moral responsibility. Their union fractured for the oldest and least romantic reason in politics: power. This is an inconvenient fact for those now eager to portray one as the lesser evil. The disparity between them today is not evidence of a moral gulf. It is evidence of unequal access. One sits atop the vast machinery of the state, commanding agencies, budgets, appointments, and patronage. The other, having fallen from favor, operates with a fraction of that reach. This is why mistaking diminished opportunity for diminished appetite is an error that would be comic were it not so politically consequential. Yet this is precisely the DDS argument now being advanced. This is the equivalent of arguing that the burglar caught outside a convenience store must possess superior character to the one who emptied the bank vault. But if Sara Duterte cannot be trusted with hundreds of millions of pesos, on what conceivable basis should the public conclude that she can be trusted with a national treasury measured in trillions? Power does not make people more honest. It does not wash away the temptation to steal. It simply gives that temptation a bigger budget, a wider reach, and more people to help carry it out. To mistake limited opportunity for genuine integrity is more than naïve. It is like assuming a thief is honest simply because he has had fewer chances to steal. This is the point the musician-turned-lawyer-politician completely misses. And this is how standards collapse — through “arguments” that slowly redefine dishonesty as something tolerable, provided it is not the worst example available. Such remarks deserve condemnation because they ask citizens to abandon the principle that makes accountability possible. Every abuse of power must stand or fall on its own merits. Once that principle is discarded, corruption no longer needs defenders. It begins defending itself. A politician who thinks the way Bondoc does should never be in government. Pastilan. – Rappler.com