One of the people I did not to hesitate to vote for during the last senatorial elections was the guy with the coolest slogan: “Kapag bad ka, lagot ka!” and the hippest caricature, Joker Arroyo: the man who had survived the Marcos administration, and continued to serve the Filipino people during his stint in government during the Cory, FVR, and Erap administrations without losing the respect of the Filipino people.

During that election, even if he had made the questionable decision of joining the putrid administration slate, there was no doubt in my mind that Joker Arroyo would continue to be the champion of the people and would be the last person who would follow the spineless footsteps of Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Juan Ponce Enrile, and Tessie Oreta. I figured that given his excellent track record and reputation for independent thinking, along with his advancing age, which led me to assume that guy surely wouldn't throw away everything he had worked for and fought for all his life, a vote for Joker would not be wasted.

Many others must have felt the same way as I did about his uber-cool slogan and caricature, because self-proclaimed “People's Dragon” handily won another term in the Senate. From the start of his new term as an administration senator, it was pretty obvious that Joker had changed. He still tried to put on an air of independence, but at the same time people could see that he was actually starting to toe the administration line. Issues that used to bring out the best in him were now met with an ominous silence. That kind of silence would be par for the course with a majority of our Senators, but for a well-known champion of human rights and self-styled enemy of corruption, the silence of the man who cried out from the rooftops that “Kapag bad ka, lagot ka!” was too simply too difficult to ignore.

While it was evident that Joker was not the same man many of us had come to admire and even serve as the mold for what an ideal Filipino senator should be, his sellout was not yet obvious. He was still independent most of the time, and was still performing excellently in his duties as a senator. Whatever concessions he had made to the administration were noticeable but forgivable.

My vote for him started to feel wasted when his name came up as the guy who was “lawyering” for the then embattled Romulo Neri during an executive session where Neri was reported to have almost spilled the beans on what he knew about the NBN scandal. Joker firmly denied that he played a significant role in that but his actions in calling for an investigation into how that supposedly sacrosanct information was leaked to the public led to many doubts in his supposed role in suppressing the ugly truth from coming out of the horses mouth.

Joker Arroyo is one of the main reasons why I have not yet completely written the Senate off as a useless institution, so I was understandably crushed when I witnessed the “People's Dragon” actively participating in the administration gangbang of Jun Lozada. Here was a man who was putting everything on the line by telling the world all he knew of his personal knowledge of corruption by powerful officials in government, a man who insists under oath that he had just been taken against his will by agents of a government that is pulling out all the stops in trying to suppress his damaging testimony; and then Joker Arroyo, the one person who is supposed to be on his side because according to his campaign platform and service record, is supposed to be this country's hope against corruption and a staunch defender of human rights; has chosen to ignore the witness' testimony and instead concentrate on discrediting the witness instead.

Disappointment is proportional to expectation. The greater the expectations, the greater the disappointment if those expectations are not met. During the Senate investigation, Jun Lozada quoted Thomas Aquinas by saying “The worst kind of corruption is the corruption of the best”. Joker Arroyo's fall from grace made that statement even more relevant.