CHICKENPIE.The bloodbath only means her blood.
Specifically hers. Only hers. The blood in question — the blood she referred to when she said "bloodbath" — is exclusively and entirely the blood of one Sara Zimmerman Duterte, Vice President of the Philippines, and has nothing to do with the three people she previously arranged to have killed. This is the official clarification from the defense team. Please print, sign, and file accordingly.
Just to catch everyone up: the Vice President previously said she hired an assassin to kill the President, the First Lady, and the former Speaker of the House if she herself was killed first. She called the resulting impeachment trial a "bloodbath." She appeared at the Senate and declared she would be "bloodied but unbowed." Her team now explains: bloodbath means only her own suffering. The hitman part is a separate issue. The bloodbath is metaphorical. The kill contract is emotional expression. The whole thing is nuanced, and it would be unfair to take her at her previous word.
This is skilled legal work. You take a sentence involving three named targets, a hired assassin, and a conditional kill order, and you sand it down until what's left is: she feels sad about being impeached. That's the argument. It took multiple lawyers, presumably billing hourly.
The trial is Day 4. More days are coming. Senate staff have reportedly mastered the art of taking notes while appearing professionally, deeply unbothered.
Somewhere around Day 2, the proceedings shifted from "did she say what she said" to "what did she mean by what she said." This is the legal equivalent of asking whether a knife is sharp in the traditional sense. Yes, she said it. There is video. The video does not require annotation.
But this is how it always works. Defense spokesman Michael Poa stood in front of cameras and said the pronouncement "should not be taken as violent" because the Vice President "did not intend to insinuate." We receive this. We nod. We go back to watching the livestream. We've been doing this long enough that we have a muscle for it — the clarification muscle, the one that automatically adjusts the meaning of what someone said to the meaning they now prefer. It's been in use for a very long time in this country.
The story now is: Sara Duterte is the one who will bleed in this trial. Her blood. Not theirs. The bloodbath is a personal, solitary experience. Everybody else is safe.
Mayon Volcano has been erupting for 189 consecutive days. Nobody has scheduled a press briefing to explain what the lava actually means.
I'm just saying.
