Help! Is there a veterinary clinic with an animal psychiatric ward?’
Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo Lacson tweeted this yesterday in an apparent reference to critics of his crusade against budget insertions and his handling of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee investigation on the flood control corruption scandal.
Lacson – who earlier said he would rather respond to his critics’ outbursts with silence – no longer held back in his stinging rebuke of his detractors.
‘We have a crazy cat that keeps meowing on the ground floor and an annoying dog that keeps barking on the upper floor,’ Lacson said on X.
Lacson called out someone as an ‘annoying dog barking’ in the plenary of the Senate, although he did not say who.
He posted the tweet a day after his chief critic in the chamber, Sen. Rodante Marcoleta delivered yet another scathing privilege speech on Wednesday night calling out the veteran budget watcher’s accusations of ‘insertions’ in the national outlay.
Marcoleta questioned Lacson’s criticisms of senators’ budget amendments for their pet projects in his ‘moral crusade to denounce budget manipulations as the breeding ground of corruption’ – only to ‘shift tone’ and ‘get off his hobbyhorse of morality’ by urging Congress to ‘heed the public outrage.’
‘What does this mean? That after all the thunder, we simply move on? This inconsistency, first condemning insertions as corrupt, then quietly moving on without demanding redress only deepens public distrust. Are we truly committed to reform, or merely staging rhetorical battles without the resolve to clean up the rot?’ Marcoleta said.
Lacson also called out a ‘crazy cat. meowing’ on the ‘ground floor,’ an apparent reference to the House of Representatives.
He did not name the person, but the congressman who recently got on his nerve was Cavite Rep. Kiko Barzaga, who posted on social media an election campaign photo of Lacson with controversial contractor couple Curlee and Sarah Discaya, apparently as a way to discredit the Senate Blue Ribbon committee’s flood control corruption hearings.
Lacson said the photo was taken during a meeting with the two upon an invitation of a friend during the campaign period. He denied receiving campaign funds from the Discaya couple.
The congressman mocked Lacson on Facebook by posting a quote card with a cat’s face on the senator’s, and with his response to Lacson’s rebuke.