When it comes to dealing with the Nursing exams cheating...

Arroyo has zero-credibility to deal with it.

Her defenders on the blogosphere like Austero claim that cheating is no big deal because "everybody does it" anyway, without offering any credible proof that everybody is into this dagdag bawas thing.

See, when arroyo talks re why cheating during the nursing exams is bad, who's gonna take the phony seriously? and who's gonna take bong austero seriously?

The point is simple: The highest officials of this country, public or private, secular or religious, are the parents or guardians of this country. What they are and do is what they say and preach. How they act is what they teach. If they lie, cheat and steal, there is no warning against lying, cheating and stealing they can sound to the public that will be heeded. If they aid, abet and find ways to justify lying, cheating and killing, there is no threat they can issue to the public that will deter them from lying, cheating and stealing as well.

I’ve said my piece about the example Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has set by stealing the elections. Why should the nurses balk at trying to become bona fide nurses by answering leaked questions when the person claiming to be their bona fide President became so by counting votes from ballot boxes that were more leaky than the oil tanker that sank at the bottom of the sea near Guimaras? Why should the nurses agree to have the results of the exams rendered null and void because some of them cheated when the person claiming to be their President refuses to have the last elections declared null and void because she herself, with no small help from Garci, cheated the hell out of the voters?

But it isn’t just Arroyo who is setting a horrendous example there. I remember again Archbishop Ramon Arguelles’ breathtaking statement justifying the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ refusal to back the impeachment bid against Arroyo: “Talaga naman nandaya (si Arroyo).... Pero lahat naman nandaya e. Natalo lang ’yung iba sa dayaan.” [“Of course, Arroyo cheated. But everyone cheated anyway. It’s just that the others lost in the cheating.”]

Coming from one of the “istambay” who hang out in our neighborhood off-track betting station, that would have been dismaying. Coming from no less than an archbishop, that is reprehensible. One would imagine, as I said in a column in response to that, that the sheer prevalence of cheating would make us say in the face of the mother of all cheating that it was time we did something to make the cheating stop. Not say, “sige na lang” [just let it be], let is fester till kingdom come.

More from Conrad de Quiros: "Can anything be more hysterically funny, or a brilliant if unwitting exercise in self-satire, than Arroyo telling the prospective nurses they have to take the exams again because many of them cheated in the last one? The same reasons for requiring new exams are the same reasons for requiring new elections. No, they are more than the same reasons. Far, far more. The stakes in elections are higher. The price to pay for cheating in elections is steeper. If this country cannot survive the reputation of having fake nurses, it will survive even less the reality of having a fake president."