Saddest part about the Lien Shengwen shooting: when obvious reality conflicts with the rhetoric of political parties, reality loses in the reporting of the news. Apparently the parties would prefer to pretend Lien's shooting was not a case of mistaken identity despite all evidence to the contrary. Way to inflame things, guys.
You might have noticed my posting rate is way down. This is largely due to me being out of Taiwan and therefore less into the daily political news cycle than I once was. We've been in TX about a year now and it's clearly taken a toll on my blogging.
I feel OK about this, though, considering how well David Reid, Michael Turton, Ben Gordon, Dixteel and Frozen Garlic have been doing on their individual blogs -- not to mention the careful daily attention that goes into posts at Taiwan Matters!
I'll still post my feelings and thoughts as time goes on. I guess I have to ask if anyone would be interested in a slight repositioning of this blog to include US or Texas issues. If so, the post frequency could go up a bit!
It seems to me the DPP never manages to call out Ma on the major omission when he claims "Taiwan's future will be decided by its 23 million people," which is that the mechanism for that decision is left unspecified.
I've always been a fan of tying the referendum to that decision , and that's the DPP official policy. But they always seem to forget it to mention it when they criticism Ma on these things. Instead, they call him a liar. To me, the result is the DPP caucus sounds like shrill paranoids.
Hu Jintao's New Years address, again calling for coerced peaceful unification under "one country, two systems," went unnoticed by most of the blue media which has tried to pretend that China's thrown unification and "one country two systems" out the window.
Meanwhile, the DPP's attempts to equate the KMT and CCP's position on "One China" doesn't seem to garner public attention, and I'm wondering if they won't somehow manage to lose this battle of definitions on the "'92 consensus", which would set the stage for losing the important political contests.
If I were the DPP, I might just minimize using the unclear phrase "'92 consensus" and stick with another couple of slogans: Reject One China 拒絕一中 and also Taiwanese independence is the status quo. Protect the status quo. 台獨就是兩岸現況 維持現況
Or something like that.
New Year's musing: do you remember when the KMT claimed that combining the legislative and presidential election, and making the terms equally wrong, would have been unconstitutional? I do. And then do you remember when they went ahead and did it?
