By Mortz C. Ortigoza
After I discovered that some of my hard covered books’
collection ensconced on my book shelves in my
room had been inhabited and gnawed by termites, I immediately asked my errand
boy Galman Torres to retrieve them, clean their growing colony, and spray the
area with antidote.
Among those books damaged and consumed by fire were Bob
Woodward’s VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA, The Choice, The Agenda: Inside the
Clinton White House, and State of Denial. The other the 957 pages’ My Life:
Bill Clinton - a best seller autobiography
published by Knopf Publishing Group in 2004 - which I have not read
since my younger brother in California bought it for me almost two decades ago
had been salvaged. I read a chapter or two of it every time I wake up in the
morning while sipping my coffee.
There is a page of this hardback that I could juxtapose with the election law in the Philippines and the fateful event there could probably be used or avoided by the Pinoy's politicians.
Before citing the excerpt of that page, allow me to expand what campaign and election propaganda in the Omnibus Election Code. Section 79 describes "election campaign" or "partisan political activity" as an act designed to promote the election or defeat of a particular candidate or candidates to a public office which shall include (paragraph b); Publishing or distributing campaign literature or materials designed to support or oppose the election of any candidate (subparagraph 4).
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| Photo Credit: Television Academy |
Let's go now to the visceral: On Page 297 of My Life where governorship challenger Jim Guy Tucker (no relation to Jim Croce's folk rock Speed Tucker) of Arkansas Governor Clinton (elected later as the 42nd President
of the United States) used scathing television paid advertisement to pounce
on him that he lost his reelection.
Here’s an excerpt of that event where Filipinos running
for the national and local positions can use and exploit at the expense of
their opponents:
“My campaign would
have collapsed in the first month if I hadn’t learned the lessons of 1980 about
the impact of the negative television ads. Right off the bat, Jim Guy Tucker
put up an ad criticizing me for commuting the sentences of first degree
murderers in my first term. He highlighted the case of a man who got out and
killed a friend just a few weeks after his release. Since the voters hadn’t
been aware of that issue my apology ad didn’t immunize me from it, and I
dropped behind Tucker in the polls”.
Clinton said on his autobiography that the Board of Pardons
and Paroles of Arkansas had recommended the commutations in question for two
reasons:
First, the board and the people running the prison system
felt it would be much harder to maintain order and minimize violence if the
“lifters” knew they could never get out no matter how well they behaved; Second,
a lot of the older inmates had extensive health problems that cost the state a
lot of money. If they were released, their health cost would be covered by the
Medicaid program, which was funded mostly by the federal government.
Clinton, who survived a presidential impeachment because of the sexual MonicaGate, recalled: “The case featured
in the ad was truly bizarre. The man whom I made eligible for parole was
seventy-two years old and had served more than sixteen years for murder. In all
that time, he had been a model prisoner with only one disciplinary mark against
him. He was suffering from arteriosclerosis, and the prison doctors said he had
about a year to live and probably would be completely incapacitated within six
months, costing the prison budget a small fortune. He also had a sister in
southeast Arkansas who was willing to take him in”.
He continued that about six weeks after the parolee was out
of the slammer, he was drinking beer with a friend in the other man’s pickup
truck, with a gun rack in the back. He and his booze buddy got into a fight and
the ex-convict grabbed the gun, shot the man dead, and took his Social Security's check. “Between the time of his arrest
and his trail for that offense (shooting with a gun his beer buddy), the judge
released the helpless-looking old man into his sister’s custody. A few days
after that he got on the back of the motorcycle, driving by a thirty-year - old
man and rode north, all the way up to Pottsville, a little known town near
Russellville, where they tried to rob the local bank by driving the motorcycle
right through the front door. The old boy was sick all right, but not in the way
the prison doctors thought”.
Geez, in the Philippines our legal minds called this criminal as recidivist - the lowlife of the society who does not deserve mercy.
The future President – who said in that book how he loves
politics and the crowd – said after that incident by the ex-convict- he was in Pine Bluff in the country clerk’s
office.
“I shook hands with a
woman who told me the man who’d been killed in his pickup was her uncle. She
was kind enough to say, “I don’t hold you responsible. There’s no way in the
wide world you could have known he’d do that.”
Most voters, Clinton
averred, weren’t as forgiving. He said when he defeated Governor Tucker in
their rematch, he promised not to commute the sentences of any more first-degree
murderers and said he would require greater participation by victims of the
crimes in the decisions of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
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MORTZ C. ORTIGOZA
I am a twenty years seasoned Op-Ed Political Writer in various newspapers and Blogger exposing government corruptions, public officials's idiocy and hypocrisies, and analyzing local and international issues. I have a master’s degree in Public Administration and professional government eligibility. I taught for a decade Political Science and Economics in universities in Metro Manila and cities of Urdaneta, Pangasinan and Dagupan. Follow me on Twitter @totoMortz or email me at totomortz@yahoo.com.
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