Keystone Kops

One has not seen a greater spectacle of government people, cops, cabinet secretaries falling all over themselves than this government trying to wiggle out of the mess they got themselves into. And the longer they explain, the more incredulous the reasons become. Their explanations insult even the very memory of Pinocchio.

Take the Ortigas Rubout. However the Traffic Management Group (TMG) justify the massacre of alleged carjackers as a legitimate operation or a shootout, the bumbling and fumbling fact is that a video camera recorded the actual carnage and merciless murder of men mangled in a mess of blood.

Then, the TMG fumbled the ball further by ordering a rushed autopsy where even the basic equipment for examining the corpses were absent. Things like a still camera to capture the wounds in film rather than draw the corpses and commit them to memory. Things like a rudimentary X-ray machine to take a snapshot within and without the corpses showing the trajectory, entry and exit points of the bullets to determine velocity, distance of bullets, shrapnel or the shooters themselves. Even the dumbest viewer of CSI will readily conclude that the police doctor who conducted the autopsy was so patently incompetent that the village herbolario, Mang Kepweng, could have divined cause of death with his cigar smoke alone.

Now that the 2006 National Budget is being discussed, perhaps the good senators might want to ask these brown-nosers, ass licking officers of the PNP to justify why the crime laboratory formerly headed by the jueteng coddler, General Mosqueda, had none of the most basic equipment even for detecting a simple case of bronchitis.

Take the Garci tapes. However Secretaries Bunye, Defensor, Gonzales try to downplay the significance of Commissioner Garcillano’s haunting voice, the bumbling and fumbling fact of the matter is that the cellphone conversations of Commissioner Garcillano with Mrs. Arroyo clearly evidenced the dastardly and duplicitous direct participation of a sitting president who conspired to cheat her way to another term, confederated to lie to the people she trusted and without shame, steal the people’s will to good government.

These bumbling acts are but the latest series of a series of bumbles that I fumble to enumerate given the numerous bumbles that my memory has fumbled to remember. Thus, I mumble.

If this administration is going to be remembered for any legacy, it shall be remembered as the administration that fumbled from crisis to crisis, earning itself the eternal accolade as the Keystone Kops presidency.