KMT fights dirty in election
Former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) last month aptly described what he hates the most: “Lien Chan last night, at a campaign rally, said the word ‘bastard’ had been intended to criticize people dividing and polarizing society every time an election surfaces,” (“Lien Chan says sorry for making ‘bastard’ remark,” Nov. 22, page 2).
That fits him like a glove — he has described himself, as well as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Alex Fai (費鴻泰), Liao Kuo-tung (廖國棟), and Su Ching-chuan (蘇清泉), to mention a few. Imagine that?
Lien said that he did not call independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) a “bastard” at a previous event, but he did. This is the type of rhetoric we get from the KMT every election and it seems to get worse as time goes by.
I cannot remember the party waging one positive electoral campaign over the past 12 years.
When it looks like the party has a strong opponent facing it, its members jump into high gear to trash that person or persons to the limit. Last time, it was Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) who was viciously attacked because she was a very credible threat to New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) in the municipality’s mayoral race in 2010.
False accusations fly everywhere and the government is only to happy to follow the false accusations tendered by these rumormongers.
We have been reading so much about those cleared false accusations that I will not recount them here, but I do have one question: Why have the prosecutors who so diligently attacked Ko’s campaign team for allegedly “wiretapping themselves” in a framing scheme not gone and questioned KMT Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元), who had information about Ko’s schedule, policies and a list of his advisers that he gave to reporters. Why is he not being questioned? I believe that we all know the answer to that question.
Wei Bao Lo
Texas
KMT should retreat to China
It is said that the “apple never falls far from the tree,” and in the case of beaten Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文), no truer words have ever been spoken. He is definitely a product of his father, Lien Chan.
One would hope that as time passes we might hope to see more tolerance, less bigotry and less name-calling, but I am afraid this is not going to happen any time soon. There are those so deeply entrenched in history that they just cannot seem to “let it go.” This is the 21st century, not 1945 — the KMT was run out of China; they lost.
They got their collective backsides kicked. Theirs was a “strategic retrograde movement” with a heavy dose of shame.
The KMT regrouped on L’Ile de Formosa and picked up where they left off in China. Today, it still seems to think that the sun rises and sets on “its wonderful thing.” In the light of the 21st century the party still marginalizes those who did not “make the great journey” from China, or disagree with party policy.
Its members still flout the laws written to take profit-making businesses out of the KMT’s coffers and still they engage in what amounts to “legalized vote-buying” by promising flights and crab dinners to those who “come home to vote.”
Home? It has always been my understanding that the KMT considered China its home — maybe it should pack up and leave. Just a thought.
Tom Kuleck
Greater Taichung
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