The Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) army of blue polo shirt-clad women warriors set about protecting the party’s illicitly obtained assets in the Legislative Yuan. Newly energized, and in a chaotic scene, some of them struggled for the microphone with a male legislator of another party, while a colleague in the background yelled: “Man hitting women. Man hitting women.”
Then we had the Blue Uber-Maester, KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) herself, rocking temple and fortune-teller terminology, saying the reason that “the winds howl and the hard rain is falling” on Taiwan, that “prosperity and peace are draining from the nation,” are because President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) “lacks the requisite virtue for her position” and “came into the world on an inauspicious date.”
The implication is, I suppose, that Hung was born on a sufficiently auspicious date and wants Tsai’s position for herself.
Former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) sings former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) praises merely for uttering a few phrases about climate change and energy conservation.
If you are going to use such foreboding temple language to criticize a national leader, then you have to admit that Tsai is in good company with US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Obama and Xi lead countries with extensive, populous lands, burdened with the prodigious potential for disaster, natural or of human origin, that comes with the — forgive the pun — territory. Floods in Wuhan, landslides in Guangdong Province and protests springing up all over China; in the US, there are floods to the south, fires to the west, twisters in the Midwest, and a string of terrorist atrocities and mass shootings.
When Xi is playing the autocrat, who dares suggest that he was born on the wrong day?
Meanwhile, Republican US presidential nominee Donald Trump is lambasting Obama for making a mess of things and for risking national security and the US’ place in the world, but Trump has nothing on Hung and her fortune-telling voodoo dating back to ancient China. He thought Obama was born in the wrong place: Unbeknownst to him, it was the day, stupid.
If Hung really believes in the influence on your life of the exact time of your birth, then perhaps she should examine her own dates, to see why her own run for the presidency went awry. Or perhaps she should look into Wu’s dates, or those of former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), to see whether they are sufficiently virtuous to replace her as joint KMT chairmen?
Political interests and ideological similarities brought the KMT under former presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) in alignment with the US Republican Party, and it does appear that the two parties are likely to share the same fortune in their respective presidential elections.
Originally, the US Republican Party believed that it was going into this year’s presidential campaign with a good chance to wrest back the presidency. Little did it know that angry white sections of their base would favor Trump, a political novice who refused to toe the Republican line.
Trump’s success is proving to be divisive and threatens to lose the Republicans the US presidency. The US Democrats, on the other hand, are adhering to the rules of the game.
Meanwhile, the KMT is more interested in preserving its own pedigree, sitting there in the headlamps of past defeat, incapable of anything other than clinging for life to their beloved party assets and resorting to numerical sophistry as their lungs breathe their last.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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