Thank heavens somebody got to shut up National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) spokesman Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade and Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy, even at least for now.
Parlade’s red-tagging spree has reached a new height of idiocy and brazenness with his recent insinuations about the rise of community pantries, likening them to the work of Satan. The food donation campaign, started by Ana Patricia Non along Maginhawa Street in Quezon City two weeks ago, has unsurprisingly drawn lockdown-afflicted local folk in dire need of relief, and inspired similar charitable operations in Covid-19-hit areas across the country. But to the controversial military officer, it’s all devilish leftist deception and propaganda.
Unfortunately for the government’s anti-communist insurgency crusade, Parlade keeps on behaving like a man possessed, foaming in the mouth and hurling invectives even against civic initiatives that are evidently just being responsive and charitable, and of which he has no business scrutinizing. He can surely do his job a lot better—maybe he can now—if he reads his Bible more (oh, heck no, even the devil quotes the Scripture!), and stops bullying and tormenting anyone at will. Whether he is right or wrong in his assumptions that the pantries are communist fronts, his indifference and Bible-referenced invectives are intolerable at this time of too much misery and diminished hope, largely due to the incompetence and mismanagement of the Duterte government.
The NTF-ELCAC representative has to refrain from acting like Martial Law is back to deliver us from evil, even if his lord and master, President Duterte, has already practically packed his administration with a host of former military and police officers who would mostly do greater good just chilling up in retirement heaven.
With all talk—mostly gusts of hot air, and little to show—Parlade embodies the vacuity in leadership and competence that has led to a Covid-19 response that has fallen flat on its deflated face. That after a year of pestilential woes and economic crisis, the situation is worse than when it all started, and we’re still looking around and begging for vaccines.
Parlade and company should take into account the President’s shamefully persistent intimacy with, submissiveness to and reliance on China—a giant of a red blob and a monster of a bully and tormentor. If they haven’t, they can thereby red-tag Duterte and his communist comrades, too, anytime.
It’s a national disgrace that huge donations and vast supplies of purchased vaccines are coming from China, whence the Covid-19 virus came. Many Filipinos are being inoculated with vaccines developed in laboratories in the totalitarian country where it has come from in the first place, and they will certainly avoid it if they can still wait for other sources of vaccination.
If the likes of Parlade and Badoy have already been vaccinated with the doses from China, they will not need to look farther than the West Philippine Sea—no, not even the lowly free-food stands in a Quezon City village—to see communism at work.
Anyway, it’s already in their blood.
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