If all his accuser's charges were totally untrue, their gravity should have elicited an angry outrage in defense of his personal honor. The best the President could do was to claim not taking a single centavo, which he later revised to accepting only a gift of fish. It has not been a convincing performance. But it is still basically one man's word against another's and whatever evidence the governor has presented against the President is now merely grist for the grisly mills of Congress. There, the abracadabra of formal processes and legal gobbledygook can exhaust anyone's attention, and thus save the king by a political stalemate, even as the whole country falls into a chasm of crisis.
Democracy is a necessarily inconvenient system.
At this point in time, there is a tactical parity between the irreconcilably opposed forces for and against the President, the classic case of an infinite force moving against an immovable object. But it is an unstable equilibrium, like marble resting on top of a bowling ball, or the scales of justice just before some new bit of evidence or stunning new testimony comes to tip it irrevocably to one side or the other. It is corroboration of the charges by at least one more person with direct knowledge of the President's corruption. That person is Gen. Panfilo Lacson, chief of the national police. On both occasions, Singson addressed Lacson directly, appealing to his publicly projected character as a law officer and a gentleman, to come forward and courageously reveal what he personally knows about the President's involvement with jueteng .