Tuesday, October 2, 2007

NEWSSTAND
The ‘bully’ in Mar Roxas
By John NeryInquirer
Last updated 01:59am (Mla time) 10/02/2007

“Sometimes my passion is mistaken for anger.”

Sen. Richard Gordon is still smarting from the flak he has received over his run-in with Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano during last Wednesday’s Senate hearing and his questioning of (just resigned) Commission on Elections Chair Benjamin Abalos.

The continuing argument with Cayetano, the blue ribbon committee chair, still riles him, he said, because it involves Sec. Romulo Neri’s unwarranted claim of executive privilege -- and the distinct possibility that Neri would decline to make a second appearance at the Senate. “They let him get away ... The chair should have decided. The chairman let him get away with it.”

Gordon was the committee chair who detained Camilo Sabio, chief of the President Commission on Good Government, last year for refusing to testify before the Senate. Sabio sued, but the Supreme Court sustained Gordon and the Senate.

“The guy doesn’t even know his rules,” Gordon said, and of course he was talking about Cayetano, not Sabio. As for his grilling of Abalos, Neri’s alleged briber, he repeated what, in my view, is a question with unimpeachable logic: “Obviously the poisoned fruit has been distributed. Doesn’t it stand to reason [that] others have also been offered [a bite]?”

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