The Foreigner in Formosa

The Devil's In The Details

Taiwan's campaign document scandal?  It's no biggie, says the China Post:

As a matter of fact, DPP city councilors of Taipei made a similar on-the-spot check on the Ma campaign headquarters on March 4.

There was no confrontation, however.

The March 5th Taipei Times and China Post's archives have no mention of this (at least, after a cursory check), but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.  Still, I have a few questions about this supposed inspection.  Answers to the following might help us decide how similar the two cases really are:

• Did the DPP city councilors on the 4th enter Ma's KMT campaign headquarters alone, or as part of a bi-partisan group composed of KMT city councilors as well?  The March 12th "investigators" belonged to one party only (the KMT).
• Did the DPP city councilors on March 4th visit Ma's campaign offices as part of an expected, pre-scheduled inspection, or was it a snap inspection?  Alex Fei and his merry band showed up completely unannounced on March 12th.
• Did the DPP city councilors pretend to be fire safety inspectors on their March 4th inspection, as the KMT legislators did during their "inspection" on the 12th?
• Were the DPP city councilors asked to leave by security guards, and did they comply?  When asked to vacate the premises, the KMT legislators on the 12th elected not to do so.
• Did the DPP city councilors on March 4th try to enter Ma Ying-jeou's office unattended, which would have allowed them to rifle through campaign documents and troll through his computer systems?  Depending on the version of March 12th's events, the KMT legislators tried to (or actually DID) exactly that.

I find it amusing that the China Post attempts to spin the attempted theft of independence party documents as nothing more than a run-of-the-mill inspection.  If the inspection was so routine, why does the China Post contradict itself by saying it was 'inane'?  Because if the check was as completely proper and ordinary as the China Post insinuates, then the KMT legislators cannot be accused of 'inanity' - they were simply doing their jobs.  Ma Ying-jeou should never have apologized then, for blame would belong solely to the rioters: rioters who interfered with a lawful, proper, everyday inspection.

But if there's something not-quite-kosher about the KMT's March 12th "inspection" - as the Post concedes by calling it 'inane' - then bringing up cases of inspections that WERE lawful, proper and ordinary serves only to muddy the waters around the issue.

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Postscript:  Of course, muddying the waters is one of the China Post's specialties.  Perhaps the most blatant example of this is when columnist and editorial writer Joe Hung tries to persuade foreign readers that the 2004 shooting of President Chen Shui-bian was staged.  How is it possible, he asks, that President Chen was shot when not a SINGLE spectator at the campaign parade heard the the gunshot?

Now, any foreign reader has got to see that and think, "Wow, that certainly DOES sound mysterious."  But what the average foreign reader DOESN'T know (and any damn fool living in Taiwan IS aware of) is that the shooting took place at a campaign parade where there were HUNDREDS of big, noisy-ass FIRECRACKERS blowing up.  Blowing up left, right and center.  Pretty hard to hear one or two gunshots in that environment, as Hung is well aware.

To be blunt then: Joe Hung has a major credibility problem.  So that's why I'm from Missouri when he tells us the March 4th and the March 12th inspections were somehow similar.

How To Swindle A Rich, Elderly Widow - The Alex Fai Method

[A bit of satire.  Readers from outside Taiwan might want the background story first.]

Widow (answering a knock at her door):  Yes, may I help you?

Alex Fai:  Yes, ma'am.  You may not know me, but I'm a KMT lawmaker in Taiwan's national legislature.  I've been authorized by the legislature to conduct a safety inspection of the premises.

Widow (bewildered):  Safety inspection?  What kind of safety inspection?

Alex Fai:  Fire safety inspection, ma'am.  We've had a rash of fires in this neighborhood caused by piezoelectric sparks from improperly-stored diamonds.  You'd be surprised how often that happens.  Anyhow, I need you to show me where you keep all of your diamonds so I can make sure your jewelry isn't posing a fire hazard to the rest of the community.

Widow:  Ehhh?  You want to see my JEWELRY?  Because it might start a FIRE?

Alex Fai:  Don't be alarmed; it's all on the up and up.  Really. Haven't you heard of me?  I'm Alex Fai, legislator.  Or should I say, legislator - AND fire safety inspector.  Well, part-time fire safety inspector.  Fire safety checks are kind of a thing I like to do in my spare time...  When I'm not in the legislature.  You know - legislating.

Widow:  This sounds pretty fishy to me...

Alex Fai:  No, no, it's all perfectly standard.  In addition, the legislature has authorized me to carry out a non-fire safety related inspection of your home as well.  Inspection of a public place, we call it.

Widow (indignantly):  Public place?  Why, this is MY home!

Alex Fai:  Well, it is, and it isn't, if you get my drift. You see, YOU own a mortgage, and that mortgage is held by a BANK.  The BANK'S operations are overseen by the FINANCE COMMITTEE, of which I, Alex Fai, am a member.  Ergo, your house, from a certain point of view (and by "a certain" I mean "my") is therefore public property.  We lawmakers can't be barred from conducting inspections of public property - that's the law.

Widow:  My stars, I've never heard of anything so outlandish! 

Alex Fai (losing patience):  Ughh, am I gettin' tired 'a THIS.  Just let me through the door, b*tch!  (pushes way into house)

Ow, ow!  Stop hitting me around the ears with that cane!  Do you have any idea who you're messing with?  I'm a KMT lawmaker in the ROC legislature!  We've got a 75% majority!  I'll sue you for violating my personal liberty!  And interfering with a legislator's lawful inspections!  And, and...

Oh, thank goodness you came just in time, officers.  Ha, ha, no, there's no need to book me and take me in for fingerprinting.  And don't you go listening to anything this sweet, little old adle-pated lady says, either. Because as you can see from my ID, I'm Alex Fai, KMT legislator.

Say...you chaps wouldn't mind giving me a lift back to my pad in your police cruiser, would you?  If you're not too terribly busy?

Policeman:  Anything you say, boss.

Alex Fai:  Good lad.

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(Disclaimer: Neither Alex Fai nor The Foreigner can guarantee that users of this technique will not suffer bodily harm or incarceration.  Actual results may vary.)

Alex Fai, Would-Be Campaign Document Thief, Says He's Sorry

And that he'll commit suicide if Ma Ying-jeou loses the Taiwanese presidential election on his account.

Only thing is, it was only two and half days ago that Mr. Fai tried to get past security guards by claiming he was some big hot-shot fire safety inspector.  (Which isn't bad:  he COULD have said he was Art Vandelay, the architect.  But then, he would have had to forgo his life-long dream of impersonating a fire safety inspector!)

With a record of honesty like this, why would anyone believe anything this guy says now?

"Vote Ma or I'll kill myself."

A case of bad salesmanship if ever I've heard one.

(Alex Fai image from the ROC Legislative Yuan website.)

Karl Popper On Checks And Balances

Been years and years since I read The Open Society and It's Enemies, but there's one paragraph from Book 1 that's always stuck in my mind:

...if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problem, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question 'Who should rule?' is fundamental.  For even those who share this assumption of Plato's admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently 'good' or 'wise' (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely.  If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best.  But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question:  Who should rule? by the new question:  How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?  [emphasis added]

- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Book 1:  The Spell of Plato, p 120-121

Readers are free to agree with Popper on this one, or they're free to agree with Dr. William Fang of the China Post, who breezily dismisses considerations of governmental checks and balances as nothing more than "the balance of power fallacy."  It must dismay Fang to learn that KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou himself has become a recent convert to Popper's point of view, now that his campaign has taken a broadside from public opinion due to the recent attempt by KMT legislators to steal campaign documents from Ma's opponent.  Saturday's Taiwan News describes Ma's sudden epiphany:

[Ma] reiterated that the incident stemmed from the legislators having confused their roles as lawmakers with that of law enforcers.  The KMT has the advantage of holding three fourths of the seats in the Legislature, but party lawmakers should exercise more self-restraint in carrying out their legislative duties...

Ma vowed that if he is elected president, he will push for political reforms to make sure there was no recurrence of the confusion between lawmaking and executive power.

"I am supported by strong public opinion - anyone who opposes or resists reforms will immediately become a subject of reform themselves," Ma said.

That's rich.  Ma's gonna twist arms and make the 81 Tyrants voluntarily enact curbs upon the nearly-unrestricted power that they currently enjoy - or believe they're entitled to.

Him and what army?

Ma Ying-jeou Labors Mightily To Top Chen Shui-bian's Record

From a story in today's Taiwan News, titled, "Ma apologizes for sixth time over conflict at Hsieh's office":

Opposition Kuomintang presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou yesterday bowed three times to apologize for the sixth time to his rival Frank Hsieh, his supporters, and [to society], in a gesture seen as damage control after four KMT legislators intruded into Hsieh's campaign headquarters on Wednesday.

The reason for the multiple apologies was that four legislators from Ma's party - Alex Fei, Chen Chieh, Lo Ming-tsai and Luo Shu-lei - all tried to steal documents from Hsieh's official campaign office.  Ten days before Taiwan's presidential election.  And they got caught.  And all hell subsequently broke loose.

Apologies are of course in order from Ma, but the Taiwan News' headline reminded me of a Joe Hung column in the China Post from a couple years back, where he implied Chen Shui-bian was an unfit president simply because he said he was sorry TOO FREQUENTLY:

President Chen Shui-bian is the most apologetic chief of state in Taiwan's brief annals of democratic government -- and probably in world history as well.

He has apologized ten times in the six years of his presidency.

Hey Joe, your man Ma's not doing too shabby himself, what with 6 apologies in two and half DAYS.  That's gotta be some kinda record too, doncha think?

If it isn't, never fear:  there's still seven days left till voters here go to the polls.  All Ma needs to do is average 0.6 apologies per day, and he'll have achieved in a mere ten days what took Chen Shui-bian six long YEARS to accomplish.

Jia yo, Ma Ying-jeou!  Jia yo.

KMT Set Taiwan On The Road To Zimbabwe

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."

- Pitt the elder

"Look around.  Turn the dump upside down if you want to.  I won't squawk - IF you've got a search warrant."

- Sam Spade, from The Maltese Falcon

KMT lawbreakers gain illegal access to the campaign headquarters of Frank Hsieh, the Taiwanese independence party's presidential candidate.  In broad daylight.  From the Taiwan News' Thursday editorial:

At approximately 4:30 p.m., KMT lawmakers Fei Hung-tai, Chen Chieh, Lo Ming-tsai and Lo Shu-lei of the Legislature's financial affairs committee, literally dragged Finance Minister Ho Chih-chih and the president of the First Financial Holding Company to the DPP candidate's "Taiwan Renewal" campaign headquarters and, heedless of the protests of security guards, rushed into the building and attempted to enter the personal office of the DPP [presidential] candidate.

The legislators apparently tried to bluster their way past the guards by alternately claiming they were "inspecting a public place"* or were carrying out a "fire safety inspection."  Inspecting a public place?  That'd be lie #1.  Once somebody rents a property, it's no longer public by any stretch of the imagination.  Period.  As for the whole fire safety inspection line, I took the liberty of googling "fire safety inspection certification" on the web.  In Florida at least, certification entails 200 hours of training plus the passing of a written exam.  Yes, Florida is Florida, and Taiwan is Taiwan, so the requirements may be somewhat different.  Still, I'd be most surprised to learn that these illustrious legislators had the certification to conduct fire safety inspections, to say nothing of local fire department authorization to conduct an inspection on that particular day, in that particular locale.

The China Post provides a vivid image of what happened next:

When the group took an elevator to the 13th floor...the DPP staff cut off the power supply, trapping them inside.

(Threepio!  Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!  Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!)

The Taiwan News adds that the novice fire inspectors were stuck in the elevator for almost 40 minutes, and its account continues:

All four were eventually escorted out of the building by police called by Hsieh office staff and, surrounded by Hsieh supporters, the three were pushed into a police car, while Lo, the son of noted gangster and former legislator Lo Fu-chu, fled the scene.

The incident sparked a two-and-a-half hour confrontation as Hsieh's staff, volunteers and supporters blocked police from allowing the police cars from leaving with "suspects caught in the act of committing a crime" until a Taipei District Court prosecutor arrived to take a disposition and accept charges from the Hsieh camp.

In their statement to police, the group justified their actions by claiming to be investigating allegations that the First Commercial Bank had rented office space to Hsieh's campaign at below-market rates.  Of course, had the merry band's "investigation" succeeded, they would have been privy to confidential campaign information belonging to their political opponent, so some might be tempted to take their alibi with a grain of salt.  At any rate, the Taiwan News correctly points out that allegations of this nature merit a letter of complaint to the appropriate prosecutor's office, not vigilante action:

The KMT lawmakers said their action was based on "information" that the Hsieh headquarters was "illegally" using a floor of the 13-floor building, but we believe that there can be no justification whatsoever for the KMT legislators to take the law into their own hands and attempt literally to break into the headquarters office of a presidential candidate of a rival party.

In the history of elections in Taiwan, yesterday's incident marked the first time that staff from one party had attempted to openly enter without permission the offices of another presidential candidate.

I know it's a cliche, but I still can't resist saying it:  What did KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou know, and when did he know it?

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* Inexplicably, a link to the China Post's article on the subject, titled, "First melee erupts in run-up to polls," is nowhere to be found on its website.  Now c'mon, that was a front page, above-the-fold story!

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UPDATE:  I'm being a bit mean asking the old Watergate question of Ma, because after all, he DID apologize, in a manner of speaking.  It was one of those everybody's-in-the-wrong-so-no-one's-really-to-blame deals:

Speaking in Chiayi yesterday, Ma expressed "regret" over the incident and censored the Hsieh camp [!] for "violence".

That's something to look forward to, isn't it?  If Ma Ying-jeou wins, I mean.  Four years of Milk-Toast Ma doing nothing but apologizing, over and over again, for the extremism of power-drunk KMT parliamentarians.

UPDATE #2:  Many thanks to Tim Maddog for finding the link to the China Post story.  The link's been added to the post.