Chutzpah

Speaker Jose de Venecia is an incredibly tolerant and patient man. Those are the characteristics that have made him weaver of improbable coalitions and chief of an otherwise ungovernable House of Representatives for an unprecedented three terms.

When a handful of leftist party-list representatives walked out of George Bush’s historic speech before the joint session of Congress, de Venecia was conciliatory. He turned down suggestions that these infantile rascals be at least reprimanded. Like a kind-hearted grandfather to a bunch of spoiled brats, he dismissed the incident as part and parcel of the exercise of free speech.

The Speaker is being too kind for the good of our own democracy. And I must take issue with him on this one.

That walkout by this bunch of notorious leftist grandstanders is not about free speech. Free speech is about what their cadres where allowed to do in the streets: burning American flags and effigies of our own President, hysterical sloganeering and the use of the pork barrel funds of the party-list representatives to bus in protestors from NPA-influenced areas.

That orgy of ideological inanity in the streets was embarrassment enough. It caused the delay, due to security concerns, of George Bush’s arrival at the joint session of our Congress. It forced our government to spend more to enforce tough security precautions, assembling a force of 16,000 policemen and incurring an expense very much larger than the beautification around the Luneta and the state dinner – expenses that the leftists took issue with in a supreme exercise of chutzpah.

Chutzpah is an untranslatable Jewish word describing the mindset of a person who murders his parents and then bewails the fact that he has become an orphan. That is exactly the mindset of the leftist rabble-rousers who create distress and underdevelopment and then make a business out of bewailing the fact that the nation is distressed and underdeveloped.

The rough Tagalog equivalent is an entire phrase: ang kapal ng apog.

That walkout by the leftists is not about ideology or politics or free speech. It is plainly and simply about good manners and right conduct.

Or, more basic, it is about persons who purport to represent the people demonstrating, at important state events, adequate toilet training. They should have the basic sensibility to know when not to piss.

And who are these rascals who pulled that desperate publicity act during Bush’s speech?

The most senior of these guys is Satur Ocampo, leader of the Bayan Muna and once described by his own colleague in the communist movement, Jose Ma. Sison, a "murderer" for failing to arrest the bloody internal purges within the CPP-NPA. These purges resulted in the brutal torture and ghastly killings of cadres and guerrillas resembling the Khmer Rouge killing fields.

Bayan Muna is the electoral front organization of the CPP-NPA. It uses the guerrilla army as a coercive force to leverage votes and extort money from conventional politicians. For this it should be renamed the New Private Army (NPA). This early, the New Private Army is demanding money for "permits to campaign" in areas where their armed men are in a position to ambush and burn.

Etta Rosales and Crispin Beltran may justly be described as composing the local chapter of the Saddam Hussein Fans Club.

In late 2002, Beltran traveled to Baghdad to receive blessings from the deposed Iraqi tyrant. The blessings were dutifully used by Beltran to finance his group’s protest activities opposing the decision of the world’s democracies to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam’s brutality.

Beltran was most notorious when, in 1988, the KMU that he led was the only trade union organization to endorse the bloody Tiananmen massacre. In that horrifying event, unarmed student protestors – exercising free speech and demanding freedom – were ruthlessly run down by the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army.

Rosales, we will recall, volunteered to go to Iraq to act as "human shield" to protect the murderous Saddam regime. Like the other peaceniks who bought Saddam’s desperate propaganda line that "sovereignty" was more important that saving a whole nation from the slaughterhouse of an insane tyranny, Rosales’s pilgrimage was rendered irrelevant by the smart bombs.

Understandably, these two fans of Saddam Hussein are reluctant to sit and listen to George W. Bush describe the Philippines as a rock of freedom and democracy in Asia.

Renato Magtubo was, for the longest time, Popoy Lagman’s gofer. Lagman was responsible for the destructive communist strategy of shooting any policeman on sight. That strategy provoked an equally violent response from angry police vigilantes that took the lives of several open leftist personalities, including union leader Rolando Olalia and student leader Lean Alejandro.

JV Bautista, the rascal who tried to wave a hanky at George Bush, was Lean Alejandro’s adjutant during the eighties. After Lean was assassinated, JV fled to the US and holed up there for years until he mustered some amount of courage to return. Now, to compensate for that sheer lack of heroism during a vastly more dangerous time, he resorted to hanky-waving to disturb the president of the democratic nation that sheltered him during his moment of fear.

If he had ever acquired a green card during those years the US gave him solace from his fears, JV Bautista should have burned it instead. That might have been a more definite indication he had rediscovered his courage.

These, Mr. Speaker, are the characters whose "free speech" you intend to tolerate. They must at least be censured to establish the bottom line for decent behavior in the people’s Congress.

They are an embarrassment for the nation. We know that. They have been all through their scandalous political careers.

But more important, they inflicted a serious transgression on the honor and dignity of the august chamber you lead. Before the eyes of the world, our Congress was made to appear like a badly run kindergarten class where brats without toilet training freely crap and piss at their pleasure without regard for dignified ceremony.

I must admit, with great shame, that at one time or another I considered these rascals friends and comrades. Deep in the past, they probably performed acts that bordered on the heroic. But times have changed and their mindsets remained ossified.

After last Saturday’s incident, I am fully convinced that the nation’s collective sanity will be better conserved if this gang is kept in an asylum.

And let it not be said that the House of Representatives is that asylum.