You gotta admire how frank the High Priest of Smokes is, when he says
we are for the extension of PGMA’s term. We need her to continue what we’ve started and that is, create a society that promotes oligarchies. Plain and simple.
But his kind makes me want to quit smoking, if only to ensure that we have nothing in common.
On background, the High Priest takes pains to make it clear that he is an elected official and that he believes the governed are to be led like sheep by the governors. In the process, he makes no secret of his disdain for the writers over at FV.
Apart from his candor – which should be respected – I totally disagree with the High Priest’s world view. He writes:
You voted for us. You must trust your elected officials of the task that you reposed on us.
Ideally this would be true, except that we are never really 100% sure that the people in office are the ones who were voted for, are we? And isn’t that the root cause of all the shit GMA is currently wallowing in? I may subscribe to the belief that the legitimacy issue should not be allowed to paralyze government, but I am not blind to the consequences of the existence of that issue.
Precisely because GMA’s authority is considered illegitimate by some quarters, there is created a practical need to govern better than just satisfactorily. The leeway that people might be inclined to give to a president whose legitimacy is unquestioned is practically absent in GMA’s case. She must be more transparent, she must be more open to criticism, she must expect zero-tolerance for error, legal brinksmanship, and stupidity.
Elected officials who take refuge in Machiavellian truisms, in blind defiance of this reality, are just being moronic.
In any case, the mere fact that someone is voted into office does not negate the power of the voters to disagree with his decisions. This means that while we may have vested an elected official with the power to act on our behalf, we are not estopped from later on disowning his actions by voting him out of office. We don’t have to trust our elected officials forever; the most these people can expect is that we give them the benefit of the doubt – or come to think of it, that we should give OURSELVES the benefit of the doubt that we didn’t choose the wrong person.
This is what makes the High Priest’s statement
Like this charter change thing. People will never understand why we want PGMA to extend her term. Yes, I’m saying it here with all candor–we are for the extension of PGMA’s term. We need her to continue what we’ve started and that is, create a society that promotes oligarchies. Plain and simple. I don’t want to mince words.
Come November, we will get what we want and people will just follow us. These ordinary people do not have the strength nor the will to oppose us.
so heinous. It arrogates unto elected officials the power to select a President – a power that, under our system of government, should always be reserved to the people.
This arrogance the High Priest manifests is totally unfortunate, since he raises several valid points: that criticism should be founded on something more than just the belief that we are right and the government is wrong; that under certain circumstances, the State is duty-bound to take unpopular actions for the good of the governed; and that government cannot function effectively in a fishbowl.
The validity of these arguments will always be overshadowed by his megalomania, his contempt for the intelligence of the ‘ordinary people,’ and his apparent hard-on for authoritarianism.
Filed under: politics, MOA-AD, politics, President GMA
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