President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has apparently appointed her manicurist to the board of the Pag-IBIG fund, a government corporation that gets a portion of our salaries each month in the hopes of getting a housing loan someday. The President’s gardener has also reportedly been appointed to a debatably plum position as deputy of the Luneta Park Administration. But deputy presidential spokesman (and all-around patsy) Gary Olivar asks in all seriousness, “why not?”

We do not want people saying gardeners and manicurists do not deserve to get government posts. Ordinary citizens need representation too.

And, really, technically speaking, Olivar is right. The President’s manicurist is a regular government employee (hired to do the President’s nails), and has as much right as any other government employee to sit on the Pag-IBIG board.

And, I suppose, Luneta has gardens and plants that the Presidential gardener is eminently qualified to tend to.

So it’s all perfectly legal, I guess. In the same way that every scandal that the President has figured in has been ‘perfectly legal’.

What Olivar hasn’t addressed, aside from his disconnect with reality, though, is that those appointments would never have gone to these ‘ordinary citizens’ had they been just that, ordinary.

It’s nepotism at its most pathetic. It’s sort of sad,really,that  the President has run out of friends to give government appointments to.