Stupid. Naive. And Garcillano on the other side.

When President Arroyo got caught talking to an election official during the canvassing of votes in the 2004 elections, many people thought she was caught in the act of cheating. I thought it was stupid of her to get caught.

She was the president, for God's sake. If she needed things to get done, whatever the heck these things might be, why, she had the entire machinery of the government to do them. Why the heck did she have to do them herself.

Come to think of it, that stupid blunder, for which she has tried very unsuccessfully to ask forgiveness for, was what has caused her to be reaping the political whirlwind right now and to continue reaping it for quite some time into the future.

But if you think that committing a hallmark stupidity is all that Arroyo is capable of, think again. It seems the president is as naive as a doorbell. You press it and it rings. Either that, or she is a scheming provocateur.

A few days ago, Arroyo survived an impeachment scare on the sheer strength of the numerical superiority of her supporters in the House of Representatives. An impeachment being a political process, we can live with the result being apparently short on everything else.

After that cosmetic victory, the nation, and perhaps the world, watched Arroyo intently, wondering what she would do next under the circumstances. This writer, knowing her past tendencies, feared she would be smug and gloat nevertheless.

And my God were my fears proven, swiftly and precisely. As I wrote this, the newspaper headlines beside me screamed about Arroyo offering the hand of reconciliation and unity to her political enemies.

How naive can the president get. What reconciliation and unity is she talking about? Has it never occurred to her that she was being set up for the kill? Has it never occurred to her that her enemies will stop at nothing until she is ousted from power?

I said she was stupid to get caught in an illegal wiretap of phone conversations she had with an election official. But what proceeded from that horrendous act of stupidity was anything but circumstantial.

On the contrary, everything proceeded according to design. Among the enemies of Arroyo are some of the most brilliant strategists in the art of dirty tricks. They realized Arroyo was stupid and therefore bound to make stupid mistakes.

On hindsight, it shudders us to think how her enemies must have got her covered. If she did not make the stupid mistake of getting wiretapped by her own intelligence network making a stupid phone call, she was apparently set up to get caught in some other stupid mistake.

The man she was supposed to be talking to on the phone, former Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano has gone into hiding. Many think his apparent success in vanishing into thin air had the blessings of Malacañang. Could be.

But again, on hindsight, it is also extremely possible that it was the political enemies of Arroyo that got to Garcillano first, if you know what I mean. Garcillano could very well have been part of the setup and vanished with the blessings of Arroyo's foes.

Whatever the real scenario may be, it is still naive for Arroyo to think this is all just happenstance. The president has to get it into her head that all this is part of a grand design within which there is no room for reconciliation or unity.

So Arroyo had better stop extending her hand to her enemies. She only runs the risk of getting it slapped hard enough for her to lose her precarious balance. And then she might really fall, which is actually what most people think, it not being a matter of if, but of when and how.