Punish Ma for what?

Lee himself has undoubtedly consumed a great deal of U.S. beef, having received his master's degree in agricultural economics from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa and his Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The former president surely is not enough of an expert to state what kinds of beef are “sick” and what kinds are not “sick.”

During the time that Lee himself was president, the government negotiated with Washington on several occasions about the subject of expanding imports of U.S. beef and other American agricultural products and the recent agreement was merely a continuation of those negotiations. Now that Lee no longer runs the government, he can say whatever he likes about the outcome of those negotiations.

While unemployment remains high, the global economic slowdown is surely not directly connected to anything that President Ma has done.

Indeed, Ma's administration has managed to help Taiwan's economy weather the international economic storm and indicators are finally starting to turn around.

Many of Ma's top advisers are the very same people that Lee relied on to weather the 1997 economic crisis that wreaked havoc across the Asian region. Lee's criticism over the issues with the KMT's Central Standing Committee (CSC) is laughable, given the state of affairs that existed when Lee was the party chairman.

Lee's rule over the KMT was far more autocratic than Ma, and there is no doubt that gift-giving was a widespread practice among candidates of the Central Standing Committee when Lee was chairman.

By laughing at Ma's decision to hold the CSC election again, Lee is suggesting that Ma somehow should accept the results of the original election and let the gift-givers take their seats in the party's elite policy-making committee. That would be precisely what Lee did when he was in the same position as Ma, a move that led to raging cronyism and corruption.

It was that very image of cronyism and corruption that led Taiwan's voters to “punish” Lee's KMT by voting the party out of power in the 2000 presidential election.

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