Duterte on a roll, at home and at the UN

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is on a roll. A Pulse Asia survey released just days ago had the former Davao City mayor enjoying an unprecedented 91% performance satisfaction rating. In the same survey, an even more astronomical 92% approved of the Duterte government's handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

So overwhelming was this show of public support for a president demonized by the political opposition even in their sleep that their cohorts in the biased sectors of media, left with nothing to controvert the thunderous message, tried lamely to employ a journalistic trick journalists themselves do not want employed on their own persons --find someone to shoot the messenger.

Hence the methodology of the poll was promptly questioned. Pulse Asia was quickly slandered "False Asia." The head of a rival pollster intimated that his outfit's failure to conduct a similar survey was ostensibly due to a lack of sponsors "with deep pockets." No one among them, however, could go beyond just badmouthing both message and messenger.

As I said in my immediately preceding column, in the absence of anything to controvert the findings, the Pulse Asia numbers stay and that is that, whether you like it or not. In that same column I opined that compassion may have something to do with the numbers, instead of just pure satisfaction. Somebody reacted to that thesis, professing inability to connect the two. Now I know why the Philippines placed last in reading comprehension.

But not many people know that the Pulse Asia survey was not the only resounding victory for Duterte. Or put the other way --the resounding debacle of his critics and enemies. And the reason why not many know about this is because the biased media, thinking along the lines of the political opposition, buried the one piece of international news that scored for Duterte a one-punch knockout victory.

Sometime last August, more than 60 human rights groups from dozens of countries who swallowed hook, line, and sinker what they had been fed by Duterte's detractors, wrote a strongly-worded letter to the United Nations demanding action against his government's war on illegal drugs and alleged crackdown on dissent and biased media. They had wanted Duterte pilloried, shamed, and humiliated before the world.

But shortly before the Pulse Asia survey results came out, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution completely ignoring the call to have Duterte investigated. Instead, it voted to provide technical assistance and capacity building to help domestic efforts by the Duterte government to improve its human rights footprint.

The UNHRC resolution is a great wallop across the face of those who, just to promote their own interests, would go so far as to invent lies against their own president, their own government, their own country. Thank God there are still people and institutions that do not allow themselves to be swayed by dramatics and would diligently take the time to sift through the facts. Duterte is no saint. But he is far from the devil his enemies say he is.