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When covering Lintang Bedol, you should expect nothing else but excuses. You don’t expect answers at all, but excuses are something that our dear pal Lintang Bedol can always provide. Here are his recent excuses.

When asked about the 19 candidates with zero votes,

Bedol said he was not surprised that the 19 senatorial candidates got no votes. “Sa amin malaki talaga ‘yang command vote. Malaki din sa aming yung pupuntahan ka ng mga kandidato [In our place, the command vote is a major factor. So, too, are visits from candidates],”

When asked where the Municipal Certificates of Canvass and Statement of Votes were,

“These, I don’t know.” He said the documents got “lost” from his office the afternoon of May 29, 2007 before these could be submitted to Manila. “It should have been submitted to [the] office by the municipal board of canvassers,” he said. “A case has to be filed for us to determine who is liable [for the loss],” he added. Bedol said that he has conducted his own investigation but could not pinpoint who took the election documents. “It is possible it was taken by the same people who staged a protest at the provincial capital,” he said.

(Oh, Bedol, you had control of the documents, how the hell could they be gone, when you wouldn’t even allow anyone inside the damn compound where you were apparently doing the provincial canvass. And yet, you have the audacity to blame the “lost” documents on the protesters?)

Asked why he has not appeared before the Comelec until yesterday,

“On May 30, I didn’t appear because I was not given a subpoena,” he insisted. “It was my election officers in the 22 municipalities [who were] given subpoena[s].”

“It would be wrong for a field officer to come to Manila without a copy of a directive or a subpoena because you would not be able to reimburse your expenses,” he explained.

(And yet, you were in Manila last week, but still chose not to go to the PICC. Is it also wrong for you not to go to the PICC because no one will reimburse your taxi ride over there? But, what you are telling us is that you were reimbursed to go to The Comelec building but not the PICC? Two weeks of hiding because of reimbursement, I had hoped you could come up with a better excuse)

Asked about Fraud and Cheating in Maguindanao,

“Cheating has to be established by evidence. Unless that is proven, there is presumption of regularity,” he said, noting that the claim of teachers who appeared on television saying there were no elections “cannot hold water.”

(but of course cheating can’t be proved either because all the evidence are “lost”, and you tried to prevent anyone seeing the cheating because you stopped everyone from observing the canvassing)

Closing Thoughts

So, when asked about the 19 zero votes, it’s all legitimate he says, but we’ll have to take his word for it because there’s no proof to say otherwise. Since he made sure that no one would be able to observe the provincial canvassing, and that we will have to just take his word that the canvassing was honest and clean. And yet, even though the compound was so heavily guarded during the canvassing that not even the NAMFREL or the media could get inside, he is telling us that someone else must have taken the documents. When it was only Lintang Bedol and his subordinates that had access.

Asked about witnesses, he disregards them as not being legitimate. And yet, who are we to believe, these teachers who would risk death in order to provide testimony, or Lintang Bedol who refused the watchdog’s pleas to observe the canvassing, the same Lintang Bedol who has gone missing for the last two weeks. I honestly think that Lintang Bedol must be out of his mind when he tells us to believe him and not the witnesses.

But the way justice is for Lintang Bedol, he is presumed stupid until found guilty.

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