First, it was the alarm clock. Then I heard rain -- heavy rain. The day would get much worse. Fortunately for me, I was far, far away from the real mess.

Later this morning at the CKS International Airport in Taoyuan, Taiwan, it was a worse mess than I had imagined it would be.

Lien Chan was on his way to China to sell out Taiwan, and there were thousands of both protesters and supporters on hand to fuck shit all up.

Among the protesters was this bèn dàn, wearing an A-bian (Chen Shui-bian's nickname) hat and a shirt with the words "Save Taiwan, 'pay respects' (?) to Lien Chan."* [See UPDATE below.] The pan-green TSU had called for a "peaceful demonstration," saying that nothing worse than "egg-throwing" should happen.

After last year's presidential election, Chen Shui-bian urged his supporters to simply stay away from the pan-blue protests to avoid trouble. Do you think Lien Chan would have told his supporters to do the same today? Nah, me neither. He didn't.

Hell, hell, the gang's all here
Among the supporters of Lien Chan that showed up were gang leader Wang Lan and her husband ex-husband Er Leng-tzu* (sp?), who had brought throngs of gangsters to the airport with weapons ranging from slingshots to clubs to swords. [*Er Leng-tzu is his "nickname." His "real" name is Chu Chia-hsun.]

On the side of the protesters, people were doing stupid things like setting off firecrackers and throwing rotten eggs inside the airport.

On the gangster side (the supporters of Lien Chan, if you really need me to be more clear), they were doing things like throwing water bottles, overturning trash cans, beating up old people, and stabbing others. The guy pictured at the bottom of this article was severely beaten by a bunch of people in black clothes and others wearing shirts that look like the ROC flag on which the KMT loves to jerk off, leaving the victim in a sizeable pool of blood (scroll down to the fifth picture on the page).

A New Party legislator displayed a (supposedly) bloodied forehead that he blamed on "pan-greens," but Huang Kuang-chin -- who was at the scene -- said on Wang Pen-hu's TV show tonight that he must have been hit by something thrown by his own side because the protesters weren't even inside at that time.

According to this evening's news reports, 3,500 police were on hand for the feast of blood, but not a single arrest was made, despite many of the beatings being captured both by news cameras and personal video cameras.

Maybe the sun'll come out tomorrow...

UPDATE: The word I couldn't read clearly was actually "sha" which means "to kill, execute, put to death," and the writing was vertical, so it should be read from right to left (though that's not always the case). Therefore, the translation should've read: "Kill Lien Chan, save Taiwan" (at least, according to the Liberty Times). Although I don't support the "kill[ing]" part of this statement at all, I should remind readers that Lien himself said last November of Chen Shui-bian that "Anybody can kill him,"and that People First Party legislator Thomas Lee said last April that people should "shoot President Chen dead" if they run into him. Remember, those are politicians talking, but that other guy is still an asshole and an idiot.