Pan-blues have had enough of the truth
Taiwan's opposition pan-blues have been alternately crying their eyes out and advocating the murder of the president ever since they lost the March 20, 2004 election (for the second time in a row, I might add) to Chen Shui-bian. All the while, they've whined about wanting the "truth" about the election eve incident in which Chen and his running mate Annette Lu were both shot, sustaining only minor injuries.

One of the pan-blues' main (and silliest-sounding) "battle cries" has been "no truth, no president." Chen Shui-bian keeps giving them more truth than they ever bargained for.

Over this past weekend, crybaby sore loser Lien Chan "challenged" President Chen to hold a referendum on "Taiwan independence" alongside the legislative elections this December. Lien, being the chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT), should know as well as anyone that according to the law written by the pan-blues such a referendum would be illegal. But logic has never stopped Lien before. Why should it now? After all, he's still fantasizing that he won the election on March 20, 2004 and then declared himself "emperor," giving himself the "right" to go above the law as he sees fit.

Ah! If he only had a brain.

Temporal mathematics
The combined votes of Lien Chan and his own vice-presidential candidate running separately in 2000 came to 58%. They failed to take changing attitudes towards a "Taiwanese identity" into account when counting on their alliance to get the same number of votes in the 2004 election.

Speaking at a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) campaign rally on Sunday evening, President Chen made another truth painfully apparent to the pan-blues: party does not equal state as it did under Chiang Kai-shek's authoritarian rule.

The 12-pointed sun emblem of the KMT is barely distinguishable from the emblems contained within the symbols representing each of Taiwan's military branches, the police, on the flag of "Taiwan" -- or more accurately, the "Republic of China" (ROC) flag which is used in Taiwan -- and on the flag of "Chinese Taipei" that Taiwan is forced to use in international events such as the Olympics. To top it all off, the "national anthem" is actually the KMT's party anthem, too. Doesn't the KMT's behavior sound a bit like that of Nazi Germany?

President Chen has told the KMT to change their emblem within 3 months or he will revise the National Emblem Law if the DPP and the pan-greens get a majority in the legislature in December. The KMT's reply was just too funny. They told Chen to change the flag instead, even though he promised first in 2000 and again in 2004 that he wouldn't change the flag (and he has a reputation for keeping such promises)! They gave him a choice of four flags and demanded a reply within 3 days. Hahaha! The pan-blues sure get all bent out of shape when Chen keeps his promises and doesn't act like a "dictator."

Ah! If they only had brains!

STILL IN PRODUCTION: I'm still working on my shootdown of the pan-blues' "Bulletgate" pamphlet. The first installations should be online within a week or so, but I'm not making any flat-out promises as I've got to whittle down nearly 40 pages (so far) of text and HTML code into segments that are a bit more manageable.