huwag ka sanang magpadala kay conrado de quiros o kay alex magno o kay bongbong marcos (strange bedfellows, eh?) na hinahamon kang tumakbo for president sa 2010, na para bang if you dont seize the day ay tipong you will miss the bus altogether.

i so disagree.   while it is true that you could win because of the ninoy-cory-kris connection, are you really ready?   the nation would expect great things of you.   the nation would expect you to be a president extraordinaire who would at the very least bring about a palpable improvement in the lives of millions of filipinos looking for jobs here at home and food on the table three times a day.   that won’t happen just because you aren’t a liar, a cheat, or a thief.

i agree with tony abaya, what we need is a forward-looking president, a truly revolutionary president, someone with the attributes and visions of lee kwan yew, mahathir mohamad and gen. park chung hee.

… it is someone who has the qualities of these three foreign leaders that the Philippines badly needs in order to overcome decades of consistently poor governance, restore our badly battered self esteem, and draw for us a credible vision of what we want our country to be.

We need someone like Lee Kwan Yew who was/is personally incorruptible and at the same time was/is so conversant with economics and international relations that he could speak ex-tempore and defend his policies before an assembly of multinational CEOs and diplomats and made/make solid sense, whether they agreed/agree with him or not.

In addition we need the strong sense of nationalism of Mahathir Mohamad who in the 1980s drew a vision – Malaysia Vision 2020, that sought and seeks to transform Malaysia into a fully industrialized country by the year 2020 – that he was able to convince the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious people of Malaysia to embrace as worthy of their national loyalty, beyond the narrow appeals of their tribes and ethnic groups. No mean feat, considering the catastrophic demise of equally multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Mahathir’s nationalism also expressed itself in his readiness to fearlessly fire back at other countries, other world leaders, as well as international agencies whenever he felt they were trampling on the national self-interests of Malaysia.

We also need the single-minded determination of Gen. Park Chung Hee to transform his impoverished, resource-poor and inconsequential Republic of Korea from 1961 to 1979 (when he was assassinated) into a fully industrialized country that is now one of the ten biggest economies in the world.

… this is what the Philippines needs, a leader who can start and lead a revolution, a peaceful one, as much as possible; a violent one, if necessary.

you could be that leader, noynoy.   given your parents, the history, the genes, the values, you, more than any other filipino, can do it, can be it.    but not without serious preparation for the role, which would mean learning not just from your mother’s successes but also from her mistakes — e.g., land reform, foreign debts, atbp. — and, most importantly, by being truly your father’s son not just in terms of his sacrifice but also of his political ideology.

when your father came home in ‘83 he had a program of action that he drafted while in exile in boston.   surely that program of action is worth looking into — other  than the dismantling of military rule, things haven’t changed much, except gotten worse, since the  80s — and hopefully, you will be up to the revolutionary challenges it poses.

forget de quiros and other hopeless romantics who urge you to run in 2010.   to do so, and to fail at non-violent revolution because you are not ready, would be the end of you.    in effect, you’d be neutralized, which would be a shame.