Here we go again.
Sometimes it’s really hard to tell which is more full of shit: The Philippines’ pathetic excuse for a president or it’s highest-circulation daily “newspaper.”
Another fake news headline on the Philippine Daily Inquirer website today reads “Duterte tells US: Pay if you want VFA to stay.” But once again, Dturd wasn’t speaking to the US. He was speaking to Filipinos he was trying desperately to impress, in this case troops at Clark Air Base. He’s done this kind of silly shit before, of course. And his media enablers play right along and amplify his loose rhetoric beyond all truth and reason.
Dturd “demanded the United States to ‘pay’ if they want to continue its Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the Philippines,” reads the lead sentence of the Inquirer’s breathless nonsense. That exercise in ridiculous grammar should really win some sort of prize for bad news writing and incompetent editorial supervision. But we digress. The bigger problem is that Dturd didn’t demand anything from the US. All he did is pop off again before an audience, spouting what he may wish he were saying to US representatives.
In a stark example of paranoid rambling, Dturd told the Clark troops “I would like to put on notice if there’s an American agent here that from now on, you want the Visiting Forces Agreement done? Well, you have to pay,” according to the Inquirer, which once again confuses stenography with journalism. Hint: simply repeating whatever some kook says is not journalism.
It was just last month that Dturd made similar noises in public, telling cabinet members that he would demand Covid 19 vaccine doses from the US and terminate the VFA if he doesn’t receive them, which the Inquirer duly repeated without question. But in the month that passed, they never got around to following up and determining whether Dturd had actually communicated that demand, or anything at all, to the US.
So here we go again: Blustery statements by a frightened provincial elite brat trying to impress men in uniform whose respect he obviously craves, and ridiculous media stooges hanging on his every word but providing nothing of substance to readers.
So since the Inquirer is obviously not up to the task, maybe an actual news outlet can pose the obvious question: Have you presented any actual demands to the US regarding the VFA? Why do you make these ridiculous theatrical spectacles of yourself rather than clearly communicate with your treaty allies?
The likely truth here is that the US has already committed to provide substantial assistance to the Philippines, as it has done countless times before. But now a crude politician feels it necessary to publicly “demand” the assistance that’s already been committed, so that he may give the impression that his demand was responsible for securing the assistance.
This is an old, old act. Why does anybody still fall for this stupid shit? Seriously.
Manila Pagpag 