Big News.

The beginning of the week was a smashing success if you think of bad news as a house party. The Central Intelligence Bureau (CIB) announced that they apprehended, ahem, a dead man, Chen Yi-hsiung, who, according to the CIB tried to kill President Chen Shui-bian last March. It's not always good news when you get your guy, especially if he is as stiff as a board and can neither defend nor incriminate himself. This end is just grist for the mill for the die-hard conspiracy lot. And die-hard they are; their raison d'etre is to find the "truth," which means getting the public to swallow their scurrilous lies.

Then China leaked some of the language contained in the "anti-secession" bill, a bill that reinforces China's threats to invade Taiwan, while reminding the world that Beijing would prefer the international community to treat China's belligerence toward Taiwan as an internal matter. The story got good play in the press, and CNN trotted out its China-Taiwan expert who parroted a number of Beijing's characterizations of Taiwan. Sigh.