Dying leadership

My favorite balladeer Engelbert Humperdinck enthralled Manila's senior citizens at a SRO performance at the PICC on June 24. Juan Antonio Lanuza writes: Engelbert can still dish out his classic repertoire of ballads and have the audience eating out of his hand. He still sings with his famous honey mellowed voice. His last two songs at the concert were the popular "Release Me" and "My Way." My favorite is "Inamorata."

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Anthony Spaeth in the July 4 issue of TIME Magazine says of the crisis in the Philippines: "If ever the Philippines needed some holistic healing tips, it's now - a conspiracy to bring Gloria Macapagal Arroyo down. It's not just one plot however. There are countless being hatched, some surreptitious, others gleefully open. That has spawned a host of wild rumors, often spread in text messages - GMA will declare martial law.

"The spurious warnings mask the fact that Arroyo does indeed have lots of enemies. The public now has access to a tape - recorded telephone conversation of Arroyo discussing the manipulation of votes with an election official after last year's presidential polls. If authentic, it would be a grave abuse of power. The Presidential palace says the tape had been altered, but Filipinos are coming to their own conclusions: The recording is on the Internet, and CDs of the conversation are being sold in the streets for ten cents apiece."

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Gloria Arroyo has admitted being the female voice of the tape. She must also admit to the fact that all those phone calls made to Virgilio Garcillano of Comelec by her and others, such as her spouse Mike, are just as authentic, and therefore these conversations taken in their entirely show the criminal activities that were engaged in. How then can GMA claim that her calls to Garcillano as being merely a 'lapse of judgment' when the acts are clearly criminal in nature?

Ninez Cacho Olivares of the Tribune writes, "More appalling is that former justice of the Supreme Court Jose Vitug had advised Gloria on what to say in breaking her silence. What happened to integrity, ethics, to simple moral and legal values when a former justice even advises the President to continue lying to the Filipino people? A nation cannot be anything but lost when all moral and legal scruples expected of its leaders are completely gone."

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Argee Guevarra adds: "The controversy leashed by the Gloriagate tapes delivered by Samuel Ong and obtained by no less than GMA's spymasters in the ISAFP was a lucky punch for anti-GMA forces. As a lucky punch, it may have battered and bloodied the administration but could not, on its own, knock out the President. Concededly, the prevailing public sentiment is that the GMA leadership is dying, but a new political order could not yet be born. The question of a suitable replacement begs to be answered.

"People maintain their cynicism towards politicians, whether from the administration or the opposition. I therefore propose as idea first offered by Captain Trillanes of the Magdalo Group: Retire all government officials, whether elected or appointed who are forty years old or older and replace them with fresh blood who have the energy and idealism to run this country properly and not to the ground. Our present crop of leaders are deadweights who must be allowed to fade to the oblivion where they truly belong in order to start the regeneration of a new society, with hardly any trace of the old, corrupt and rotten political order."