People First Party (PFP) lawmakers leveled some disgraceful accusations on Wednesday: they alleged, without providing evidence, that not only had President Chen Shui-bian (
Just when voters thought that the nation's legislators had hit rock bottom with their distasteful campaign shtick, the PFP has managed to do one better. But should anyone be surprised, given that the PFP has been rapidly moving to the very extreme of the political spectrum? They had, after all, incited their supporters and a number of gangsters to launch attacks on the Presidential Office and a Kaohsiung court after the presidential election, dashing any pretence of moderation on their part.
These last four years, PFP legislators have been able to bask in the glow of PFP Chairman James Soong (
The accusations, it turns out, came from a radio program hosted by former New Party stalwart and media mogul Jaw Shaw-kong (
What does it say about the credibility of Jaw that he would lend weight to media reports from China, where journalism largely serves as a mouthpiece for the government and where Chen is labeled a traitor for advocating Taiwanese independence? If Jaw's idea of fact-checking is searching Google, then nothing complimentary can be said about him or his organization.
Why did they not check with those who, according to the story, had personally witnessed Moscoso show off the alleged check? Why did they not attempt to locate the check itself? Bent on exposing their own Watergate, these "journalists" don't seem to know or care that investigative journalism is a hard slog -- as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein discovered investigating a head of state and his aides.
On Wednesday, Presidential Office Secretary-General Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said legal action would be taken against those who made the accusations. This is an option that should never be exercised vindictively, but in this instance, it is perfectly warranted. Otherwise, unless Jaw and the PFP retract their accusations and apologize, the dignity of the office of the president and that of Taiwan's allies will have been trashed.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this
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