The pan-blues' latest strategy for trying to avoid embarrassing questions about their relationship with China has apparently been acquired from the Shaggy album Hotshot, in particular the strategy outlined by Shaggy in It wasn't me to solve the problem of his friend RikRok.
RikRok's difficulty is succinctly laid out in the chorus: "Honey came in and she caught me red-handed, creeping with the girl next door/Picture this we were both butt-naked banging on the bathroom floor/How could I forget that I had given her an extra key?"
Shaggy's advice to his friend is simply to deny everything, say "it wasn't me." RikRok finds this strategy unconvincing given the long list of places where his girlfriend has witnessed his antics -- "she even caught me on camera." Shaggy insists; tell her anything you like but don't admit to what was so embarrassingly obvious; "convince her, say you're gay/Never admit to a word when she say."
This is exactly the strategy the pan-blues have adopted when faced with allegations considering their now widely known conspiracy with China. The allegations were raised again by President Chen Shui-bian (
Since then the pan-blue camp has followed a legislative agenda that seems to be almost drawn up by China. Recently the KMT had to ban its legislators from going to China to celebrate the PRC's national day on Oct. 1. A number of pan-blue legislators had been invited for what the invites called "contributions to the interests of China." The pan-blues realize that getting into bed with China is not a vote winner in Taiwanese elections. They also have discovered that even with their lockhold on the majority of Taiwan's media, their extensive interactions across the Taiwan Strait cannot be suppressed for ever. So as well as requiring their camp followers to be more cautious, they are also hoping that outright denial is going to work: "It wasn't us."
People First Party Chairman James Soong (
How Chen looks down on the people by telling The Post the truth, we do not know. Soong has shown his contempt for the Taiwanese a number of times -- such as in his suppression of Taiwanese-language broadcasting when he was head of the Government Information Office, in the lies he told to cover up KMT murders in the 1980s and in his engineering of Elmer Feng's (
Even in the last presidential election campaign we had a wonderful example of this contempt as Soong tried to explain away the Chung Hsing Bills Finance scandal and the accusation that he had robbed his own party with a story that changed every day and which a three-year-old could see through. It's obvious here who is "insulting the people of Taiwan."
Soong insults our intelligence and sense of morality every time he stands up to speak.
Soong did make one useful suggestion however. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) should go public with what is known about the pan-blues and China. DPP Legislator Trong Chai's (
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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