DAVAO Mayor Rowdy Duterte is not yet the president – we understand that – but there is no harm if he started to talk and act presidential while awaiting his formal inauguration on June 30 as the 16^th President of the Republic.

Advancing his maturing into the presidency will help calm critics monitoring his every move and reassure his 16 million-plus supporters that they did not err in voting for him last May 9.

Having been treated to his profanity-spiced public outbursts since he climbed the presidential ring in October last year, we are wont to ask if Duterte has a personality problem. His antics have been disquieting.

The Philippines and its neighbors are awaiting a favorable ruling on an issue that Manila has raised before a United Nations arbitral tribunal on China’s claim over a vast area of the South China Sea – and here comes Duterte slamming the UN out of left field. What is he trying to prove?

In a televised press conference Thursday, he unleashed an unprovoked attack on the UN while responding to unrelated questions on foreign groups’ criticizing his seeming justification of the murder of journalists who may have violated their code of ethics.

“That’s the trouble here, they’re always raising fears about this or that United Nations convention,” Duterte said suddenly. “F*ck you UN, you can’t even solve the Middle East carnage… couldn’t even lift a finger in Africa… shut up all of you.”

One wonders how a President Duterte, as sole spokesman of the country, would handle diplomatic issues as he took his place among the esteemed leaders of the region.

Maybe Duterte is still smarting from reports way back in 2008 when the then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Philip Alston, raised concerns about unsolved killings in Davao City?

Alston reported that “a death squad operates in Davao, with men routinely killing street children and others in broad daylight.” The mayor confirmed vaguely that a vigilante group had been at work in his city, boasting that he himself had shot some suspects.

Duterte, a lawyer and former prosecutor, said also that one slain reporter who was critical of him deserved to die. The victim was one of the 174 journalists murdered in the country since the end of Marcosian martial rule in 1986.

• Duterte to media: Don’t f*ck with me!

WE THOUGHT that Duterte would have learned about planning and administration from one of his supporters, the paratrooper president Fidel V. Ramos, who said that an incoming Chief Executive should “hit the ground running.”

But it looks from the foot-in-the-mouth symptoms manifested by the 71-year-old president-elect that he had hit the ground entangled in his small-town political parachute.

“Don’t f*ck with me!” Duterte bristled at suggestions that he apologize for his remarks that might embolden those who feel aggrieved by media reports/comments to resort to assassination to get even.

(Interestingly, his spokesman Salvador Panelo was the lawyer of Andal Ampatuan Jr., one of the prominent officials accused in the gruesome 2009 massacre in Maguindanao that left 58 people, including 32 journalists, dead.)

Duterte would want the press to believe that he has been simply enjoying the last few days of his rough side, promising to metamorphose upon his inauguration on June 30 into a beautiful butterfly.

He rationalized his crude manner: “I am not yet president. Mayamaya, maghintay kayo. I’m really a rude person. I’m enjoying my last time as a rude person. When I become president, when I take my oath of office… ibang storya na yun. There will be a metamorphosis… It blossoms into a butterfly.”

• Ali: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

THE MAYOR’S promising to emerge as a butterfly came a day before the former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali — who “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee” – died at age 74 in a Phoenix, AZ, hospital where he was taken for a respiratory ailment.

Ali held the heavyweight title three times, and Sports Illustrated named him the Top Sportsman of the 20th Century. He retired from the ring in 1981 with 56 wins, 37 by knockout, and five losses. Three years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Ali changed his name in 1964 after his conversion to Islam.

“The Greatest” graced the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, controlling his hands’ Parkinson’s tremors enough to light the Olympic flame. He was also at the opening rites of the London Olympics in 2012, looking frail in a wheelchair.

• Vic Torres: True friend, truthful newsman

ANOTHER sad news jolted us yesterday. Vicente “Vic” Torres, a true friend and truthful journalist, died last Thursday after a cardiac arrest. He was 66.

Vic was among the best reporters of the now defunct Philippine Daily Express who had to migrate to California in the 1970s with the declaration of martial rule.

His house in San Francisco was the Hilton of friends and media colleagues who strayed to the windy city in the Bay Area on short notice. I was among the martial law exiles who found initial refuge in his place. Vic was the type who would put life on the line for his friends.

After retirement from his IT-related job, the Batangueño returned to his native barangay Halang in Taal where he went into farming with his devoted wife the former Rebecca Kreps. Cremation is tentatively set Tuesday.