Do you recall the funny vignette then: Ver was told by Marcos to jump from a building in Ayala. The dedicated general tried to clarify but without any hesitation: “From which from floor, Sir.”

On the other hand, Laurel and company were always under suspicion, and successfully argued with the Japanese occupiers that they cannot be forced to swear allegiance to Japan under the Hague Convention.

No, I’m not excusing Dubya for a war of choice in Iraq but I would for the Allied invasion of Normandy. You can kill or be killed for a just cause. But torture and extra-judicial killings? Can plunder be justified on national security grounds?

Noynoy did not appear to be excessively romanticizing when he authored a bill to require business to share profits with workers. Neither his father, Ninoy, when he publicly professed: “I’m a Christian socialist.”

In this election, the knight of one is the knave of another. Let us not engage in romanticism excessively, that’s all I’m saying. We will be in for larger bouts of cynicism and despondency later on if we do.

GMA is within her rights and privileges if she wants to run for Congress. John Quincy Adams did so too. And if she engages in patronage in her bid for speakership, then that is no worse than if the next president attempts the same.

I’m not sure if there was even a need for Benigno, Sr to be “politically rehabilitated.” Manolo can confirm this but anybody who was anybody in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation was a “collaborator” with the exception of a handful, some paid dearly with their lives such as Abad Santos and Wenceslao Vinzons.

The election in 1946 of Manuel Roxas as president effectively eclipsed the collaboration issue. (Roxas was himself accused as a collaborator, a bitter issue raise by his opponents during the presidential election). President Roxas later issued a proclamation of amnesty for the collaborators which was approved by a collaborator-dominated congress.

Now, local administrators like Estrada and Nemesio Yabut of Makati served as Marcos lieutenants for survival, political or otherwise, and not to make the lives of his constituency bearable.

Cusp, for allowing the pillage of the economy through booty capitalism, for one, some Marcos technocrats deserved to hang by the lamp post.

Hair-splitting? More than 3,000 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 torture victims, and about 100,000 victims of arbitrary arrests when there’s neither a civil war nor a global war to speak of?

Let’s get real, the power of persuasion and of setting the agenda, not formal authority, is the real power of any president, whether of a mature democracy or a Third World country. And cusp, you very well know that unless, a dictator, a president cannot monopolize policy making.

“Electing a shiny white knight to replace her will not change the dynamics of this.” Are you then suggesting transformation by other than normal means?

My point is that demarcating a point in time, i.e. 1986, 2001, 2005 or 1945 for that matter becomes arbitrary if not haphazard for these reasons. The one constant in all this since the early 1900s is the dominance of political families in milking the system to engage in patronage to retain power.

It doesn’t matter which dispensation prevails. Mrs Arroyo is but the latest in a long succession of presidents since Quezon who have exploited the potential for centralising authority based on patronage. Electing a shiny white knight to replace her will not change the dynamics of this.

It only took 18 months after the yellow revolution for the restoration of elite patronage based politics to occur. Under Aquino-Roxas patronage will have to be relied on from Day 1 in order to woo Lakas Kampi members who would otherwise form a majority in the House away from Mrs Arroyo.