Alam na this...

“PRESIDENT DUTERTE is not GMA. Okay? And he is very strong in [his] anti-corruption [campaign]. So, the fear of Senator Lacson is misplaced.”

So asserted Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno in a media forum at the Philippine Daily Inquirer headquarters last Tuesday.

This, in reaction to apprehensions expressed by Sen. Panfilo Lacson of a resurgence of the pork barrel system after Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo vowed that no member of the House would get a zero budget, as a number did at the time of the ousted Pantaleon Alvarez.

More than allaying Lacson’s fears and assuring the public that the monstrously corrupted Priority Development Assistance Fund shall remain in its unconstitutionally marked grave, Diokno may have effected some Freudian slip there.

Elemental syllogism: Duterte is not GMA. Duterte is anti-corruption. Therefore, GMA is…what Duterte is not.     

Alam na this…yeah, even the tambay sa kanto would know.

“IT WAS pure speculation. They were assuming that those metal – there was nothing."

As much cryptic as syntactically disjointed was President Duterte’s summary dismissal of the claim of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency that P6.8-billion worth of shabu was smuggled inside the four magnetic lifters found in Cavite.

"Yung sabi nila na (What they said that) they found the metal but they opened it but [there] was none,” the President said, cautioning – without addressing any specific agency or individual – against making such "assumptions."

It was PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino himself that reported of the “smuggled shabu” missing from the magnetic lifters they found in a raid at a warehouse in General Mariano Alvarez, Cavite.   

"I am not convinced. Next time you do not go into a speculative contents (sic)," Duterte stressed.

Aquino’s “speculation” stemmed from the four lifters matching the two earlier intercepted at the Bureau of Customs lot which carried 500 kilograms of shabu, to wit: "It's just the same. The same, exactly the same. It’s magnetic lifter, which has a power supply. It also has cables, the same cables. The color of these magnetic lifters, the same.” 

Yeah, Aquino engaging here in some abductive reasoning of the duck test: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then… OMG, it can’t be a chicken.   

From allegorically to literally animalish now, with dogs lending credence to Aquino’s duck inference: PDEA said traces of shabu in the magnetic lifters in Cavite caused their drug-sniffing canines to sit down beside them.

At a House hearing Tuesday however, Customs chief Isidro Lapeña said the four magnetic lifters tested negative of shabu after swab testing conducted by a joint team of Customs, Philippine National Police, and PDEA personnel.

Not surprisingly, given the President’s hands-down conclusion, Aquino was a no-show at the House hearing to defend the PDEA findings. Neither was the sniffing dog there.

Alam na this…Need we state the obvious pa?

“HINDI NIYA kaya, that’s my honest opinion ko lang. Kung sino lang sana diyan, in the likes of Escudero or Bongbong Marcos.”
President Duterte expressed anew his desire to step down, and with it, his utter disdain of Vice President Leni Robredo: ““I think deep in my heart, if you follow the succession and Robredo takes over, hindi niya kaya.”   

It takes but the intelligence of a gnat to see that the President’s preference for Sen. Chiz Escudero or Ferdinand Marcos Junior is as much as an abomination – Duterte’s – of Robredo, as an abhorrence – Duterte’s too – of one Alan Peter Cayetano.

Ain’t Cayetano Duterte’s running-mate in 2016, while Marcos that of the now dearly lamented Miriam Defensor Santiago’s and Escudero was Sen. Grace Poe’s?

And he failed to pop even if only in Duterte’s succession daydream!

Alam na this…yeah. Only the dense Cayetano does not. Or pretends, numbly if not dumbly, not to.