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"Pay close attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Sunday, March 21, 2004

Then came the riots

As I predicted in my last post early this morning, rioting did break out in Taiwan's 3 largest cities: Taipei (the capital), Taichung (central Taiwan), and the southern port city of Kaohsiung. As I also predicted, protesters supporting the losing Lien Chan (Kuomintang, AKA KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party) / James Soong (People First Party, AKA PFP) ticket and demanding a recount of the ballots from yesterday's presidential election are still gathered in Taipei in front of the Presidential Office, though things have gotten slightly less chaotic there. The sealed ballot boxes have already been seized, so these protests are absolutely unnecessary.

The situation in Kaohsiung, however, became quite violent. Before I went to sleep (sometime after sunrise today), I watched (on live TV) protesters there -- encouraged by People First Party legislator and habitual liar Chiu Yi -- crashing a Lien-Soong campaign truck into the gate of the courthouse there, while police stood just on the other side.

These riots have resulted because of irresponsible politicians making several unfounded and highly ridiculous claims regarding their election loss to the incumbents, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice-President Annette Lu. The final trigger, coming mere seconds after telling his supporters to "stay calm," came when Lien Chan told the already "frenzied crowd" to "Prepare to annul the election."

These tactics are mimicking almost exactly those of Bush supporters in Florida after the U.S. presidential election of November 2000. Hopefully, people will have a long enough memory to realize just what the fuck is going on and will soon relegate this kind of "politics" to the same corner of history as Nazism.
Posted at 2:30 PM by: [Permalink]
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