Lien Chan makes me laugh ...

The party chairman of the KMT, a man who has led his party into three consecutive losses (and it looks like it may be four soon), including two presidential defeats and a loss of seats in the last legislative election, says he is willing to make peace with President Chen Shui-bian, if of course the president will compromise on a couple of issues.

Lien says the KMT will pass Chen's defense budget which Chen has been trying to push through for well over four years now if Chen will be a gentleman and cut it in half. As I pointed out in my very first post here, Taiwan, if the initial budget is passed, will still be paying only 2.8 of its annual GDP on defense, less than Singapore, less than South Korea, less than the US.

Here on the eve of the legislative elections, it looks like Chairman Lien is getting the heebie geebies. He has sniffed defeat one time too many and if he goes down this time, it's off to the abattoir.

His other offer? That if the Chen administration will not interfere with the 319 Special Truth Investigation committee, the KMT will accept its findings. My what a generous man you are Mr. Lien!

For those who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, this committee was formed to investigate the shooting of the president on the eve of the presidential election. Formed under the auspices of a pan-blue vote (the opposition to the president, many of whom still believe that the president had someone shoot him in order to gain a sympathy vote to win the election), the committee is clearly unconstitutional and has extralegal powers, powers the judiciary and police might envy.

Lien, when he speaks of interference, is referring to the ruling party's legal challenges to the constitutionality of the committee. So if the ruling party will let this farce of a committee distort the constitution and the judicial process, he will accept the results.

This from a man who has already implied that any result that goes against his wishes (notice the sense of entitlement here) must be a result of illegal, political interference. Lien threw such a temper tantrum a couple of weeks ago when the court threw out his party's case to annul the election that, in a moment of calculation surprising for such a dullard, he used a classical Chinese idiom that could be interpreted as a call for violence in a speech he gave after the court's ruling. In everyday Chinese, what Lien said could be taken to mean that since the president had stacked the courts (a ridiculous allegation by the way) and had won his election through fraud, anyone was entitled to kill the president. Of course, the nuance, the spirit in which the idiom was intended in its original form meant that anyone could admonish or punish the president for such behavior.

Lien has not accepted a single result that has run counter to his belief that he and only he deserves to be in power since he lost the presidential election. Why on earth would he start now?