Backstory rife with military-grade acronyms

Today's Taipei Times reports that there have been "no major disturbances" in the recount of the ballots from the March 20 presidential election in Taiwan as of press time -- implying that things are simply SNAFU -- but things are actually FUBAR if you're looking in the right places.

The pan-blues being more predictable than the weather, I didn't bother to use qualifiers like "I guess" or "probably" when I foretold in my last post of what "we will see the two-faced crybabies" doing, and they immediately proved me right.

ETTV News last night was running a loop of computer-generated examples showing what would have been considered "valid" ballots in the election. These included ones where the voter's name chop was stamped mostly in the appropriate box but extended past its boundaries, ones where the ink had smeared leaving an obviously reversed "ghost" impression in the other candidates' box, and one where the voter had placed their stamp over the picture of the candidate (as was the procedure in previous elections) but canceled the mark and placed their stamp in the appropriate place for the same candidate -- all of which were made legal before voters went to the polls on March 20. (RTFM)

The problem was that all the examples they showed were ballots which would count for the Chen-Lu (Chen Shui-bian and Annette Lu) ticket -- the implication behind the entire recount being that they "stole" the election via a "staged" assassination attempt and "vote fraud." While similar votes for the Lien-Soong (Lien Chan and James Soong) ticket would be counted the same way, an aftertaste remained which told me that the people at ETTV were doing their best to imply otherwise.

This creates "clouds of suspicion" -- the very thing which the pan-blues accused Chen-Lu of creating by being shot the day before the election. Want more "clouds"? Keep reading...

Yesterday's TV news was also reporting that there were already over 1,000 ballots which have been set aside as being "disputable" (in favor of Lien-Soong), yet these reports weren't giving viewers the whole picture. As far as the pan-blues are concerned, any vote counted towards the winning Chen-Lu team on March 20 would be "in dispute," but in the end, it is up to the judges to determine if -- by the rules put in place before the election -- the "disputed" votes should count in favor of either pair of candidates or be declared "invalid" once again.

But since the pan-blues own and/or control most of the media, the news you see will, of course, be full of pro-blue propaganda because the pan-blues know deep in their cold black hearts that if they let justice run its course, they will still -- and even more clearly than before -- be the losers.

Another bit of "up-is-downism" coming from the opposition sore loser crybaby pan-blue ticket is the claim that they will accept the recount -- but only if it's "fair." Everybody knows that Lien's only definition of a "fair" election (DILLIGAFF?) is one in which he wins. He and Soong lost separately in 2000 and together in 2004, and they just can't accept this second defeat. "Sore loser crybabies" is just about the only way to describe them.

I'm gonna forecast heavy clouds for at least the next 9 days.