http://worldmeets.us/images/typhoon-aquino-rice_pic.png

Philippine President Benigno Aquino hands rice to a hungry

mother and daughter. Typhoon Haiyan, known to Filipinos as

Yolanda, is proving almost as damaging to Aquino politically

as it has been to the life and limb of his people.

 

 

An 'Irrelevant President', Not Anderson Cooper, is Our Problem (Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippines)

 

"The sobering reality never seemed to sink into the heads of administration officials, their seeming ignorance of the breadth and length of the destruction hard to fathom. ... The impression President Aquino tried to project in his CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour was of a government in control, but this was belied by the situation on the ground. ... The humanity of the entire world, now converging on the Philippines, honors the victims. Never mind if the most powerful man in the Philippines has not. He no longer matters. He is no longer our leader."

 

By Antonio Montalvan II

                                           http://worldmeets.us/images/Antonio-Montalvan-_mug.jpg

 

November 17, 2013

 

Philippines - Philippine Daily Inquirer (Original Article (English)

Philippines President Benigno Aquino: Is the world judging he and his government too harshly, given the scale of the disaster wrought by Typhoon Haiyan?

NEW YORK TIMES VIDEO: A sample of President Benigno S. Aquino’s statements on Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Nov 13, 00:01:06RealVideo

This is not just a case of shoulda, woulda and coulda - and Anderson Cooper has nothing to do with it. Note that even Philippine media reported in a similar fashion. Even without CNN (and add to that the BBC and Al-Jazeera) and other commentaries, the cries of the hungry and homeless survivors of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” in Tacloban sound like more than simple pleas, to say the least.

 

With each passing day, as the entire world heard the same cries we did, Malacañang’s response (or lack thereof) to the full-blown and worsening crisis became all the more baffling. The sobering reality never seemed to sink into the heads of administration officials, their seeming ignorance of the breadth and length of the destruction hard to fathom. For example, it was media that told us of the small islands off northern Cebu that had gone for days without food and shelter - and that no government aid had reached them.

 

The impression President Aquino tried to project in his CNN  interview with Christiane Amanpour [watch below] was of a government in control, but this was belied by the situation on the ground. That disconnect now appears to have sent the once much-vaunted popularity of the president into a nosedive.

 

Six days later - remember, six days without food and water is an eternity and the entire world was watching, Mr. Aquino asserted that he was in overall charge of the relief effort. That being understood as a tacit admission of the Malacañang Palace's shortcomings, frustration burrowed deep into the public consciousness and sentiment. The Aquino “charm” had imploded.

 

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SEE ALSO ON THIS:
The Philippine Star, The Philippines: Filipinos 'Thank God for the United States!'
The Daily Tribune, The Philippines: Thankfully', Americans Reject Aquino Relief Control
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippines: The Unfair Typhoon 'Blame Game' of CNN and the Rest
The Daily Tribune, Philippines: New York Times Joins CNN in Shaming Aquino Typhoon Response
Cebu Daily News, The Philippines: Without CNN, Desperate Filipinos would be Forgotten
The Daily Tribune, Philippines: CNN Rightly Shames Aquino Government Over Typhoon Response

 

To be fair, no one is expected him to emerge a [weather] expert after the strongest typhoon to hit land in recorded history. If Mr. Aquino fumbled, that’s understandable. We can forgive him for that.

Posted By Worldmeets.US

 

But after his interview with Amanpour, it became clear that he was jumbled. He said the estimate of 10,000 deaths was likely too high, and apparently, the figure so irked him that he sacked the police director who reportedly gave that figure. President Aquino seemed so fixated on his pre-Yolanda framework of “zero deaths,” that he told Amanpour that the approximately 1,000 deaths that had at that point been reported would most likely not rise substantially. At that time, news reports were coming in mostly from Tacloban or were focused on that city. Casualties in Capiz, Iloilo, Cebu, Coron, and even nearby Eastern Samar and Ormoc, were as yet unknown. Now that as I write, the death toll has reached 3,600, proving the President wrong, we wonder: Were his lieutenants feeding him incorrect or guarded information? Was there a cordon sanitaire in the days following the tragedy?

 

On that same sixth day after the Typhoon, Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman and Interior Secretary Mar Roxas reappeared in Tacloban. We know that Roxas was in Tacloban since the day before Yolanda made landfall. When hotel guests were crying for help, they claimed Roxas just walked by them, surrounded by his bodyguards, unperturbed by the chaos that was beginning to emerge. Then he was lost from the TV cameras - for days.

 

http://worldmeets.us/images/typhoon-boy-hungry_pic.png

A boy amongst the ruins of his home destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan in

Leyte Province makes the best possible use of a news photographer,

Nov. 14. The long wait for aid is costing lives, and wounding President

Benigno Aquino politically.

 

In the meantime, [broadcaster] Korina Sanchez threw a tantrum on air over Anderson Cooper’s reporting on the “disorganized” government response and relief efforts in the aftermath of Yolanda. That effectively cost the president more points with a public that had by then grown depressed over the heart-wrenching images of death and devastation Yolanda left behind.

 

Notice as well that in his interviews, Mr. Aquino would continually refer to “local government.” Tacloban’s Alfred Romualdez is not only an opposition mayor, he is the scion of a family that many see as the nemesis of the Aquinos. To be sure, the recounting by Romualdez and his wife of the mayor’s “inspecting the ballroom of a family resort” to see how much damage Yolanda inflicted on it registered badly with the public, which will have to hold him to account for that as well. But notice, too, that the same references to “local government” and “shoulda, woulda, coulda reacted to the crisis” were echoed by Roxas in subsequent interviews six and seven days after the fact. Where was the Aquino Administration in the meantime, when concrete, effective response and relief efforts were lacking from the Palace,  as it punished Mayor Romualdez for not coming to the aid of his suffering constituents?

 

Overnight, the public’s pet name for the president “P-Noy” metamorphosed on social media into "BS Aquino." No need to ask me what that means.

 

 

We honor all those who have died in this heart-rending calamity. We honor the woman who slept night after night with the corpses of her three young children because government was nowhere, so that they could have even the "decency" of a mass burial. We honor the old woman whose only daughter had to leave her in her sickened state in order to search for food. We honor everyone who now wakes up to another day of sorrow they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.

 

We honor them not because the most powerful man in this country has not, but because it is the right and humane thing to do. The humanity of the entire world, now converging on the Philippines, honors them. Never mind if the most powerful man in the Philippines has not. He no longer matters. His irrelevance has begun to be exposed. He is no longer our leader.

 

 

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Posted By Worldmeets.US Nov. 18, 2013, 2:59am