Warped Politics

I'm thinking it's about time to address some of the political nonsense that has been going on recently in the two countries I've spent most of my life in, the US and Taiwan. Of course politics is always full of absurd characters and ridiculous statements, but we've reached some new lows lately.

In the US, the big debate is over health care, but for the moment I don't intend to address this particular issue at length, but rather some of the rhetoric the extreme right wing has been directing at President Obama and his administration. Of course the latest example of this to make the news was the Republican from South Carolina actually loudly accusing Obama of lying when the latter was making a speech to a joint session of Congress. Now there are a couple of issues involved here. The first is of course whether Wilson's accusation (namely that Obama's statement that the reform he supported would not provide care for illegal immigrants) was true. The facts seem to indicate that it was not, as the current bills specifically exclude require proof of legal status. Of course some illegal immigrants may manage to take advantage of the system, but that is quite different from having a bill which would purposely encompass them. But then there is the second issue involved -- even if it was true that Obama's statement was not accurate, was the time and place appropriate from calling him on it? On this issue there is the greatest amount of agreement among reasonable people of both parties, who generally acknowledge that it is not considered good form for legislators to heckle the president in this kind of setting. So why does Rep. Wilson suddenly think it's acceptable for him to do so, abandoning civil discourse for the type of shouting that's been seeing lately at town hall meetings across the US? In my view, it is symptomatic of the bizarre, deep seated hatred the extreme right has for Obama, something that's surfaced again and again in the past few months.

First you had the idiotic birthers, who claimed that there was some doubt that Obama was born in the US, which was the intellectual equivalent of questioning whether humans landed on the Moon, whether the Holocaust happened, or even whether WWII was a real historical event. What was ridiculous was that a few conservative media figures seemed to give credence to this nonsense, though to be fair it must be noted that even some of the most extreme ones (such as Limbaugh and Coulter) dismissed the birthers' claims out of hand, as any sane person should.

Then there was Glenn Beck, who made the bizarre claim that Obama hated white people, despite the fact that his mother and the grandmother he was closest to were both white, he grew up more among white people than among blacks, and he himself is half white. Of course his borderline slander was strongly criticized, so seemingly partly out of revenge, he targeted one of Obama's advisors, Van Jones. Jones was accused of being a communist, of insulting Republicans, and of supporting a petition regarding 9/11 which asserted the government was responsible. Now I can't claim to have investigated these claims in detail, but from what I've seen they were frankly no big deal (certainly no worse than Beck's own ridiculous statement about Obama). First off, if Jones did ever say he was a "communist", I suspect he meant in the general sense, that is to say he considered a society where most property and capital was owned by the community rather than corporations and individuals (Jones is a community activist, after all). This type of "communism", while not popular among libertarians and the wealthy, is hardly sinister. Jones did call Republicans axxholes in a speech, but frankly many of them are, and in any case he said he himself was one in the same speech. As for the 9/11 petition, my understanding is that it simply called for an investigation on whether government officials might have known an attack was imminent. While I personally doubt this was the case, the idea is not completely absurd (as opposed to actually claiming the government was behind it, which is ludicrous); after all, to this day there are credible historians who suspect the Roosevelt administration may have had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In any event, Jones has said he disagreed with the contents of the petition. So Beck himself is allowed to make ridiculous attacks on Obama but Obama's advisors are not permitted to have opinions that are basically reasonable, if slightly controversial? Give me a break.

Yet another recent incident was Obama's recent speech to school children. Without apparently having any knowledge of the content of the planned speech, rightwingers asserted that Obama planned to "indoctrinate" American school children with "socialist" ideas. Leaving aside the fact that socialism is not necessarily a bad thing, and that American children are already indoctrinated with questionable ideas that rightwingers support, such as nationalism (and if they had their way, they'd be indoctrinated with others such as Christianity and "intelligent design"), these paranoid claims revealed once again a bizarre fear and hatred of Obama, as if he could somehow poison children just by talking to them -- and talking to them only once. The idea that it's terrible for the US president to give a speech to school children is disturbingly strange; presidents have given this type of speech before, and no one got excited about it. And the actual speech, from what I've seen, was the noncontroversial type you'd expect to be given in this context. So what are these people getting excited about?

I generally try not to be like some liberals who manage to find racism as a subtext in almost everything, but in this case I'm beginning to wonder if it might be a factor in all the vitriol. Certainly many of the people we've heard the worst sorts of attacks from are mostly of the type whose racial sensitivity is somewhat questionable. Wilson of South Carolina, for instance, though I don't think he's truly representative of the average person of his state, unfortunately may typify a certain segment of the population (after all, South Carolina is not exactly known for liberals or for racial harmony). Beck of course actually accused Obama of being a racist, but an observant person will be aware that people who are particularly quick to make this type of accusation against others are often guilty of it themselves.

I suspect that the extremists' vitriol comes from a combination of factors. First, they are generally prone to this kind of thing, especially if someone they consider even slightly liberal is in the White House (after all, Clinton didn't escape this kind of attack). Second, they particularly fear Obama because of his popularity and his obvious rhetorical skills. Finally, they consider his background unusually threatening, because aside from being part African (the racism factor), he spent a lot of time abroad (horror of horrors!) and he used to be (shudder) a community activist (run for your lives!). Levity aside, though, this type of warped thinking seems to be far to prevalent in the US nowadays.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, the former president Chen Shuibian, the only non-KMT president in the nation's history, was convicted along with his wife, his children and several close confidants of graft by a district court. So what kind of sentence did he and his wife get? A life sentence. That's right, a life sentence for graft. Now don't get me wrong, I think corruption is bad and should be punished, especially if the guilty party is a national leader. What's more, I think Chen was probably guilty of something. But life? Normally people get life sentences for rape and attempted murder. I've never heard of anyone getting a life sentence for corruption, outside of countries like China, where they execute people for graft among many other things (actually in the case of corrupt officials, they are really executed for being unlucky enough to picked out as an example when the government decides to make people think they are doing something about corruption, and for belonging to the wrong political faction). No Taiwanese politician has ever gotten anything close to a life sentence for corruption. The notoriously corrupt KMT ran the country for 50 years, treating all of Taiwan like party property (or the property of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his family, which was also guilty of far worse crimes than corruption), and no KMT politician has received a sentence like this. What's more, Chen had his civil rights annulled for life, meaning he can't vote or run for office. By contrast, a few years ago a known gangster was able to run as an independent for the legislature from prison while serving a brief sentence (not a life sentence, of course) and won. A Taidong politician from the KMT who won the election for county commissioner was forced to surrender his position due to a conviction for corruption (again, the sentence he received was much milder than Chen's), he turned the office over to his wife (actually his ex-wife, as he divorced to get around a law forbidding him to appoint a family member to take his place). She in turn was accused of using county funds to take frequent trips abroad, but just a day after Chen was convicted, the prosecutor's office declined to indict her. Anyone aware of such cases or with even a basic knowledge of Taiwan's political situation and history can't help but see Chen's sentence as a blatantly political one. The irony is this will allow Chen to legitimately claim to be a martyr, a role he has already been overly eager to see himself in.

All this nonsense is almost enough to make one of those people who tries to ignore politics entirely. Unfortunately, I'm very aware of the truth of the statement which goes "you can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you". So I'll continue to concern myself with what's happening, as bad as it may get.