I was watching the nighttime re-run of the talk show “Morning Girls” on the Filipino Channel at around 1 a.m. on April 23 when I realized that the whole show was dedicated to alcoholic drinks! How could a morning show spend the whole time talking about drinking, when no doubt many children were watching?

The producers had even set up an entire bar in the studio where the show is taped. The hosts, Kris Aquino and Korina Sanchez, sat around grinning idiotically as they discussed how much alcohol certain beverages had. Kris even sipped one of the bar’s concoctions and made a show out of acting as if she were already tipsy. It was all so terribly baduy!

Two of the guests, Jake Roxas and Robin da Rosa, were apparently there to prove that one could drink and still be macho and good-looking. Da Rosa even boasted that he had been drinking for 20 years from the age of 12. At this point Kris interjected that she didn’t recommend that anyone start drinking at such a young age. But that was the whole problem with the show: It sent out wildly contradictory messages about drinking. On the one hand it made it seem glamorous and sexy to do so, especially when Kris swanned around the set, drink in hand. On the other, it kept warning younger viewers not to start drinking at a young age.

I think it was a terrible mistake to dedicate a morning talk show to alcoholic drinks. Were the show’s producers that desperate to come up with a topic? And where were the censors of the Movie and Television Review and Censorship Board (MTRCB)? Asleep or just plain uninterested? They should have scrapped the whole idea.

I’m certainly not a person who believes in censorship, but in this case I do think that ABS-CBN deserves to have its knuckles rapped by the MTRCB, and hard.

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Sending Troops to Iraq Is Wrong

I was glad to see on Wednesday that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned the Arroyo administration’s plan to send a 500-member Filipino contingent to Iraq, when no specific invitation to do so had been extended by either the Iraqis (how could they, they don’t even have a government yet) or by the American occupiers.

Composed of medical personnel, social workers, policemen and soldiers, the Filipino contingent would be paid a miserly $3 each a day by the United States on top of their Philippine pay. The US government is also supposedly paying to get the contingent from Manila to Iraq.

The senators on the committee urged Malaca?ang Palace to cancel the plan, but noted they couldn’t stop the president from pushing through with her plan if she insisted on sending the contingent.

With American plans for Iraq still murky, and with pockets of Iraqi resistance (the most notable being that of Iraqis in Falluja, where trigger-happy American troops have already shot dead at least 20 Iraqi protestors), some members of the Filipino contingent have already asked that they be deployed in less disturbed areas of Iraq.

In the rush to please the Bush administration, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is overextending herself. With a Muslim rebellion in Mindanao, sporadic attacks by the communist New People’s Army nationwide, and a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in various parts of the nation, does the Philippines really have the resources to overextend itself by sending a contingent to Iraq? I don’t think so.

What is so distressing to note is that the American administrator of Iraq, Jay Garner, is dealing with governing the country on a day-to-day basis. No master plan seems to have been drawn up; either that or the Americans are keeping it a secret.

Already Iraq seems to be breaking up along sectarian lines, Sunni versus Shia, Kurds versus Arabs, and so on. US President George W. Bush keeps insisting that the United States wants a representative, non-religious government for Iraq, no doubt terrified that the Shia majority might turn the country into a theocracy much resembling that of next door neighbor, and member of the “axis of evil”, Iran.

Americans are already finding themselves unwelcome in Iraq, and should thus ensure that a new Iraqi government is formed as soon as possible. Filipinos are already exposed to many dangers at home, and don’t really need to expose themselves to more danger in Iraq. It would do well for President Arroyo to remember that the war on Iraq was an optional one for Bush. Iraq never threatened the US, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and no links between Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda terror network have been established.

It now seems clear that Bush wanted this war with Iraq to get rid of Saddam and to control the region from Iraq. Sure the Americans are withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia, but they’re staying in Qatar, Kuwait and of course Iraq. I predict they will have US bases in Iraq for at least 10 more years. Then the US may withdraw them after realizing that they cause more trouble than they cure.

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