Roxas twits Duterte, Poe

Administration presidential candidate Mar Roxas on Friday twitted two of his rivals in the race for Malacañang for flip-flopping on their policy statements.

Roxas chided Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, the new front-runner in the presidential voter preference surveys, for his conflicting stand on the country’s territorial dispute with China over the West Philippine Sea.

After saying he would challenge China to a shootout and fisticuffs to resolve the sea row, Duterte changed his tune by saying he would engage China in bilateral talks.

The Davao mayor, however, again backtracked and stated that the territorial conflict should be resolved through international arbitration.

“As Mayor Duterte continues to talk, it becomes clearer that his words are just full of nonsense, contradictions and hot air,” Roxas said in a news briefing after speaking at an agriculture forum in Pasay City.

“What I want to tell Mayor Duterte is that the [security] of our country and the lives of our soldiers are at stake in this issue. This will not be resolved by issuing innuendoes or threats,” he said.

He said Duterte should understand that a President is also the commander in chief of the Armed Forces and that the soldiers would comply with the President’s order even if it would imperil them.

As commander in chief, Roxas said the president should be calm. “It’s not about using threatening words. Lives are at stake here,” he said.

President Aquino’s anointed successor also assailed Duterte for openly supporting the communist New People’s Army rebels who, he said, had been illegally demanding revolutionary taxes and had killed government troopers.

Roxas also trained his guns on Sen. Grace Poe, the erstwhile preelection survey leader, for saying she would appoint the tough-talking Duterte as anticrime czar.

During the presidential debate in Cebu City last month, he said Poe stated several times that she would designate former Marine Col. Ariel Querubin to lead the fight against crime under her presidency.

“Being president is a serious job. A President is a promoter and guardian of the interest of the entire Filipino people. You cannot do this halfheartedly or using innuendoes,” he said.

“The words of a president and commander in chief automatically become policies. They should be well-thought-out and not spoken just for effect,” he said.

Roxas said Poe was wrong when she claimed that the Aquino administration failed in its fight against criminality, reiterating that the average weekly crime incidence in the metropolis was now down to 261 this year from 918 cases in 2015.

“If only she studied the data (from the police), she would have known this,” he said.