Pride, respect and Sotto

Let's be clear.  I do not own this pic.  It's from GMATV.

Senator Tito Sotto should be the final argument why a public official should not be voted into office because of mere popularity.  Lito Lapid would have been the best argument but since it seems that the only time that he opens his mouth is when he lets out a yawn, he cannot claim party to a debate, let alone a discussion.

So Mr. Sotto comes into the RH Bill debate, fresh from treating the recently concluded Chief Justice Corona’s Impeachment Trial as a showcase for his emceeing skills culled from his decades-long experience at Eat Bulaga, and he is making his darndest best to appear and sound erudite.  The appearance part he got down pat.  He is an actor after all.  But the erudition part he failed miserably.  He is an actor after all.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are many intelligent people in show business.  But you know they are intelligent because they stay away from politics.

No one is running away from him from debates as he would like people to believe.  But it is not as if the mere mention of his name would elicit quivers from anyone who could construct an intelligible sentence.  In fact, several non-politicians are calling him out to an issue-based one, which the Senator promptly dismissed and ignored, reasoning out that it would demean the Senate as an institution if he engages in a word tussle with people that were not even elected to any public office.  But it is he who demeans the Senate because he was unfortunately elected into it.

Tito Sotto does not get it.  His passion against the RH Bill is unquestioned, at times he even comes across as sincere, even noble.  But that is beside the point because indeed he does raise some good points.

It is him.  He is the point.  Or the pointless.

Tito Sotto is a different breed, a class all his own.  He opens his mouth and out comes words that are not his.  And when he is called out, he behaves as if he is beyond censure.  Oh the sense of entitlement of this senator.  He even thinks that the word products of other people are his for the taking, or the blurting out.

I write.  And I write.  And I write.  But never have I attempted to pass off somebody’s work as mine.  It’s called pride of one’s intellect and respect for another’s.  Apparently, Sotto owns neither.

And now the latest episode: Sotto does not plagiarize another’s work – Robert Kennedy’s this time – but he translates it into the vernacular. And he laughs and derides people who again, naturally and thankfully, called him out, asserting that there is no plagiarism because he used another language to mean what Kennedy originally said in English.

Sotto is clueless.  Shameless.  Shameful.

And then he would cry that he is being cyber-bullied.  He is not.  He has shown enough obliviousness to prove that he is immune from any and all verbal attacks – be it from cyberspace or from the senate floor.

On the contrary, he is the big bully.  The “big man” who cannot be faulted for lacking originality because according to him, last he checked, plagiarism is not a crime in the Philippines.  Well, it maybe not.  But the way he shows disregard and disrespect for another’s intellectual output is criminal.  And the fact that he is a senator of the land showing the citizens of the Philippines, kids included, that being a copycat is totally acceptable is utterly despicable.  It is not only criminal.  It is heinous.