PHILIPPINE POLITICAL HOOLIGANS

Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte and. Sen.Mar Roxas, two of several candidates  in the country's presidential race, have been exchanging brickbats, even if the campaign period has yet to begin in 2016. Dirty Harry has challenged the senator to a gunfight. This son who bears a great name has previously dared Dirty Harry to a boxing bout.

Duterte is supposed to be a lawyer while Roxas, a scion of old wealth, was a graduate in business at an American school.

They are behaving like school bullies who run roughshod over their hapless classmates.
Behave like global leaders, the former Philippine president Fidel Ramos said by way of advise.

Bad-mouthing rivals and muck-raking are signature brands of Philippine politics that has remained mired by exponents of low-level political campaigns and practices.

In the slap-sticks type of politics, limited talents and mediocrity are not impediments to run and win public office. The great unwashed that comprise the great majority of voters and the political imbeciles have one thing in common  with respect to these traits. So the latter ascend the thrones and stay there with nothing to do but wait for the standard operating procedure that brings in the dirty money.

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The Inquirer writer US-based Boying Pimentel has taken the cue by writing an article on presidential assassins from President Manuel Roxas to President Ferdinand Marcos. But Pimentel dwelt lengthily about the latter about FM's record as "killer" of many people during the martial law years.

What is at issue here is the number of persons personally killed by Dirty Harry during his reign as Davao City executive. It is not the number of criminals that he caused to be eliminated through his Death Squad.

In the same manner with  Marcos, it is not the number of persons he allegedly caused to be killed via the apparatus of martial law. (In a cacique type of society where the oligarchs reign supreme, there is a need for reforms and that is what Marcos did. And the so-called democracy advocates had to stand against him and the tension had to result in confrontation and death.)

If  Marcos indeed personally killed Julio Nalundasan, the political rival of his father Mariano, it was only the person he murdered on record.