My Life as Adoga

All right, I'm going to confess my ignorance (as if admission is necessary when something is so blatantly obvious). I don't know what a "moral center" is, at least insofar as how it is referred to by Academia Sinica sociologist (tell me really, who can trust a sociologist ?) Wu Nai-teh. In an article in today's Taiwan News , scholar Wu is quoted as saying that the DPP leadership has for the past eight years suffered from a "confusion of power." This he defines as President Chen Shui-bian's failure to figure out the challenges he was facing and his resulting inability to meet people's expectations. I'm not going to get into my old argument again, which is that no matter what the president could have done or tried to do, he was stymied every step of the way by a vicious self-interested opposition party (the evil blues) that controlled the legislature and the press. The evil blues would either kill a piece of legislation outright, or pervert it ...

It seems a bit of scandal affecting both blue and green has not gotten the attention it deserves. Here's the artic le from the fanatically green Taipei Times . I couldn't locate an article from the rabidly blue China Times about this topic, but that might say more about my poor Internet search skills than about the politically biased coverage of the paper. The article speaks of charges that a fugitive businessman has made "payments" to national legislators (of both parties). If an investigation proves that the politicians have taken money from the businessman, pictured here, then the question must be "why?"--why was the money offered, and why did they take it? The other "why?" of course is why do the people continue to vote for politicians with questionable ethics? KMT Caucus Urges Probe into Payment Allegations By Flora Wang Published in the Taipei Times , Saturday, Mar 29, 2008, Page 4 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus...

"Communicating with [China] is a good thing. But it would be terrible if the condition to do so were that we give up our own dignity and sovereignty." These were the words offered by DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) Legislator Lee Chun-yee (李俊毅) at Taiwan's national legislature in reference to KMT (Kuomintang) Vice President-elect Vincent Siew's (蕭萬長) attendance at this coming weekend's Boao Forum in China. Lee and other DPP politicians were expressing their discomfort with Siew dropping his title as "VP-elect" and his attendance at an event at which it is assumed all participants are in agreement regarding the “one China" policy. My comments here have little to do with the specifics of what Lee and his colleagues within the "green" party said about Siew's conference participation. Instead, I wish to opine on the general tone of these comments, which I see as unnecessarily aggressive and smelling of spitefulness. DPP caucus whip Yeh...