‘Victory has many parents’

By Alex P. Vidal

 

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”—Harry S Truman

 

ALL of a sudden, so many people are now claiming to be “responsible” or “instrumental” behind the meteoric success of newly crowned Miss Universe Philippines 2020 Rabiya Mateo.

Some of these eager beaver characters, in fact, competed with the publicity that ground-swelled in the post-coronation days where Mateo instantly became the toast of the beauty pageant community after her Cinderella-like ascension into the world of celebrity and stardom at the Baguio Country Club on October 25.

Hardly had the moment of ecstasy and state of euphoria during the pageant hours simmered down, some of these publicity freaks were already in the media talking about how they supposedly molded the 23-year-old winner of Miss Iloilo 2020 to become a phenomenal beauty queen.

Why can’t they wait for Mateo to mention their names and give the credit due them if indeed they were part of her smashing success in the Miss Universe Philippines 2020 competition?

Mateo is very much aware of the difficult roads and sacrifices she went through before she amassed the gargantuan achievement that placed Iloilo City on the radar of reverence and respect nationwide.

With her humility and intelligence, Mateo definitely knows how to give credit where credit is due; she will remember the people who delivered the yeoman’s job that helped catapult her to become a national beauty titleholder.

The more they make a noise and give credit to themselves, the more the people will suspect they are nothing but credit-grabbers and enthusiastic humbugs.

John F. Kennedy once said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

 

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UP to the eleventh hour, sinking U.S. Presidential Election re-electionist President Donald Trump continued to stick to his incredible theory that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a hoax.

We suspect the Trump campaign has decided to sustain its stand on the pandemic issue to avoid the COVID-19 discussion during their campaign sorties.

The pandemic and its deadly onslaught in America, where more than 230,000 Americans have died and the nine million people in the U.S. have been infected, has become a central topic being zeroed in by the Democratic Party.

And it has brought poll wonders for former Vice President Joseph Biden who has been leading in all the pre-election day polls by at least eight percent nationwide as of October 31.

To add misery to the Trump campaign, the stock market has spoken and has predicted a win by Biden.

The stock market’s time-tested “presidential predictor” was penciled to be right about who would win the election: The S&P 500’s 2.2 percent decline in the three months leading up to November four years ago signaled that the incumbent party in the White House—the Democrats—would be replaced, even when the polls were wrong in 2016.

“In other words, the stock market predicted Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton despite polls to the contrary,” reported Fortune’s Jen Weiczner.

 

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Now, Weiczner explained, the same stock market indicator, which is dependent upon S&P 500 performance for the three months from August through the end of October, “has finalized its prediction.”

With the S&P 500 down slightly (just 0.6 percent) over that period on the last trading day of October, the stock market’s presidential predictor, as it’s known by market analysts, is reportedly officially signaling that Biden will win the election.

“Though the dip is minor, the negative S&P 500 performance over those three months indicates that the incumbent party—in other words, President Trump—will be voted out of the White House and replaced with a Democrat,” stressed Weiczner.

 

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two dailies in Iloilo)