Fisking one of Ellen's Readers

One of Ellen's readers took issue with her recent article here:

We also got this comment from San Francisco-based Pepeton J'Anton on our criticism about the use of the "cleaned" version of President Arroyo's first inaugural speech which started with ""In all humility, I accept the presidency of the Republic" when what she actually said was: "In all humility, I accept the privilege and responsibility to act as President of the Republic."

Pepeton said: "The most that can readily be claimed about the 'discrepancy' that you cited in GMA's 'acceptance speech to the Nation', is that the quotation was not quoted verbatim.

"As to whether the inexact quotation substantially changes, obfuscates, distorts and misleads the reader or the listener, is quite a stretch. In the vernacular, fighting pilit; in the jargon of basketball, forcing through.

Pepeton J'Anton doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about Ellen. You are absolutely right to criticize the Malaya brothers for their sloppy work.

Words are important, and what the phrase "to act as president" means is that she was sworn in only as "ACTING PRESIDENT." An acting president that was unconstitutionally installed as new head-of-state by a military coup.

And the partisan Davide Supreme Court later (and not surprisingly) compounded the problem by bending the rules of the Constitution to "legitimize" Arroyo as unelected president.

"You have assumed that the intention to 'clean' the speech was deliberate (and malicious) because of the 'illegitimacy of GMA's installation into the Presidency.'

Of course they and their media friends re-edited the original version. I can remember hearing the "to act as president" portion of GMA's speech in one of DWIZ's radio ad a few days after Edsa dos. Nobody at that time was aware of how damaging that audio clip was to GMA's legitimacy case, so it aired for a couple of weeks.

It was only when Erap's lawyers started making noise about using contents of GMA's speech (especially the "to act" part) to prove that she's just an "acting president", did Arroyo's people immediately ask the radio station to pull the ad off the air. The Pro-GMA media were complicit too and did their part to clean and remove some words from GMA's speech in their website. And the inaugural speech you see in GMA's own website is the GMA Edsa Dos Inaugural speech Version 2.0.

"In May 2004, an election was held. GMA was elected. Are you now maintaining that she was 'illegally elected' because Da-Poe King (ina at ama, hanggang ngayon hindi na-established ang citizenship) complained that he was cheated out of the presidency?

Ellen, 55% of Filipinos thought that FPJ was cheated out of a victory by Arroyo. That's a lot and a majority right there.

The opposition asked that the election returns of 25 provinces be re-examined for tampering and dagdag-bawas, and the admin officials voted 200 times to block that measure. If GMA didn't cheat, why did her supporters do that? Transparency and credibility is key in any election, and sadly we got neither in our last presidential election.

"Ellen, I understand, from a personal standpoint, some of your disappointments and disenchantments and frustrations with GMA. And I can empathize and sympathize with most if not all of them. But don't you think it's time you divert your attention into some other political issues? GMA's assumption into the presidency was conducted legally."

This is typical of GMA supporters. We can't "move on" if we have a bogus president with no credibility making decisions for us.