A moment of trying to make sense of the Ukrainian crisis

PANDESAL Forum Moderator Wilson Lee Flores texts me, "Gud pm. Hi, China top journalist will interview you this Thursday lunch 12 pm at Kamuning Bakery Café. Topics on Ukraine crisis and impact on Asia..." The topic has been dear to my heart, witness my two columns last week: "Pushed against the wall, did Putin have any other choice?" So, though I had limited my attendance in the regular event, being choosy about the subject matters up for discussion, I thought Wilson's invitation was one worth attending.

Turns out, the main course for the day was a ventilation of some leftists' election campaign advocacies which I would no longer touch with a 10-foot pole — Gabriela party-list, for instance, having been exposed by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) Vice Chairman Hermogenes Esperon Jr. as a foreign-funded Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army legal front organization and therefore a no-no for the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to accredit as a candidate but, for some quite dubious reason, had been qualified for election nonetheless. So, Gabriela party-list accreditation cannot but account for what people popularly perceive as great corruption in the Comelec. For this reason, I have this ongoing personal crusade of having Comelec abolished, seeing as I do that no good elective official can come out of an electoral process that is bad.