Dispatch from Crame No. 1069:
Sen. Leila M. de Lima on that Weird Duterte-Enrile Conversation

Monday night's spectacle featuring Duterte with Enrile turned out to be a mutual ego-massaging session for two has-beens of Philippine history, one of them having been already retired by the number of his attempts at political and personal redemption that never came, the other soon to be a lame duck as soon as he delivers his last SONA in July.

It was a droll dialogue, riddled with historical inaccuracies and plain fake news, reflective of the meandering reminiscence of fading minds. The Vietnam War was already over by a few years when President Jimmy Carter stopped weapons sales to Marcos because Carter was and still is a human rights champion, and Marcos was a top-notch human rights violator. Enrile's claim that the MDT only applied to an attack in the Pacific also fails to take into account the US State Secretary's latest statement that it applied to the WPS as well. Enrile's reading of the MDT turns out to be, well, as old as the MDT.

From such false narratives the conversation quickly degenerated into another China lovefest and Trillanes bashing, sustained only by what appeared to be an Enrile-Duterte mutual fans club, one being assured of being judged well by history by the other who has himself revised history to sanitize his own martial law record.

That Duterte would go to such lengths to ask Enrile to vouch for his treasonous and obscene Sinophile policies only reflects on the bankruptcy of any justification for said policies. Duterte is scraping the bottom of the barrel by calling for backup from someone as crooked as one full of fish hooks. As I already said, it is not every day that a President commits treason, and a President so hard-pressed to defend himself against such accusations as to call on the symbol of the martial law ancien regime to back him up on his treasonous conduct only goes to show how desperate he is.

But Duterte does not get it. Enrile is the least qualified to vouch for the patriotism of his actions. A dictator's henchman is the least who could make a traitor look good. Enrile the martial law executioner cannot possibly absolve Duterte the mass murderer. Each has his own trail of bodies behind him, and both of them history will definitely not judge well, regardless of Enrile's claim to the contrary.

(Access the handwritten copy of Dispatch from Crame No. 1069 here: https://issuu.com/senatorleilam.delima/docs/dispatchno1069)