Pro-Duterte bloggers and their fairytale hero VP Sara

Pro-Duterte bloggers have gone to overdrive this week portraying Vice President Sara Duterte as the fighter who “slayed” House members during the August 28 budget hearing. 

“47 (representatives) versus 1. This is the Sara Duterte we knew and pinned our hopes on… This is the Sara we all waited for,” blogger Krizette Laureta-Chu wrote which has 3,100 shares and 2,300 comments. 

(I)t was VP Sara who single-handedly faced the congressmen, exposed their tactics, and revealed how ineffective the House is when someone stands up to their abuse of power,” wrote Tio Moreno, as his post reached more than 2,300 shares and 1,400 comments.

Then there is this Daily Duterte post:

“Yesterday’s 2025 OVP budget hearing reminded us why we love the Dutertes. They say what nobody else dares to say. They call out hypocrisy like nobody can. They maybe outnumbered but never outfought.

And most of all, they express the views of the last, the least, and the lost. The common Pinoys.

The house tried to play with Sara. She ended up changing the entire game.”

Reading these posts makes you wonder if we are looking at the same person in that committee hearing.

The blogs seem to be articulate than the vice president who was a blunt 

instrument that smashed decorum and due process during a formal congressional budget deliberation, stonewalled questions about her budget and picked on some lawmakers like a kid choosing friends in a playroom.

These bloggers want to paint this narrative of a Marcos-controlled House they labeled as “ineffective” and abusers of power but who can’t defeat Sara Duterte. 

They want to paint this as a storybook where VP Sara is the hero.

But many netizens, can see through this fiction and ask: What did Sara Duterte win when she didn’t get her P2-billion budget approved?

Let’s get the facts straight on the issue at hand.

The issue on Wednesday’s hearing was about the Office of the Vice President (OVP) budget for 2025 worth P2-billion that will come from our taxpayers’ money.

The OVP’s budget includes a P10-million budget to print a storybook filled with grammatical and factual errors.

The House of Representatives, whom we elected from our respective districts and partylists, are tasked by the Constitution to deliberate on the budget known as the General Appropriations Act.

Regardless of political affiliations and agenda, representatives need to discuss, deliberate and decide how to allocate billions of pesos. How much goes to health services, scholarships, school improvements, social services, infrastructure. How much is distributed to agencies, departments, to members of Congress and also for the President and Vice President.

This is a process that calls for transparency and accountability, everyone lays it on the table how the budget will be spent.

It’s a basic task in governance, but VP Sara made it all about her during the deliberation. Instead of answering questions of the audited P125-million confidential funds for her office in 2022, instead of answering items on her budget, she turned it into a verbal tussle.

The labels that the bloggers thrown against members of the House gets thrown back on their faces, as VP Sara Duterte is the one seemingly “ineffective” to defend her office’s budget. How she could not answer how she spent her office’s confidential funds in 11 days hints of the “abuse of power”.   

If Duterte supporters think this is how VP Sara will punch her way to the 2028 presidency, can they assure us she won’t be showing this display of entitlement and disrespect to fellow officials in the future? Or even just in the next budget deliberation? This is a democracy where there is check and balance, and not fairytale queendom.

As much as they want to make VP Sara a hero, she is not the leader we deserve.(davaotoday.com)