It's terribly wrong. The child couldn't think logically. His granny must have been a housewife before and as an old woman certainly couldn't “grow up.”

Well, that's a very common mistake schoolchildren make. They are a little too young to understand logic. But our schools at the next higher levels, including colleges and universities, have failed to teach students to think logically. Many adults are also prone to similar illogical errors, as a result.

Take a look at newspapers where stories about the celebration of traditional festivals are published. When it's time to mark the Chinese New Year Festival, all reporters invariably start their stories with: “Today is New Year's Day, which arrives once a year.”

When they refer to Taiwan, they often describe it as “an island, basically or fundamentally.” I have to restrain myself from asking them whether New Year's Day comes twice or three times a year or what Taiwan is, if it is not basically or fundamentally.

One student majoring in English wrote a composition in which she declared, “It is Sunday; so it rained.” Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between Sunday and raining? It rains on any day of the week.

President Ma Ying-jeou isn't totally free either of making similar mistakes. In a recent interview with CommonWealth magazine, he stressed he would reform the Kuomintang after he doubles as its chairman. Then he said he would make sure candidates nominated for the year-end local elections must be acceptable to the electorate and “they should not fall into corruption after they are elected.”

It's an admonition uncalled for and redundantly illogical like in the description of Taiwan as an island, basically or fundamentally, or New Year's Day, which arrives once a year. Does it ever occur to the president that each and every public office holder, be he a member of the Kuomintang or any other party, is forbidden by law to be be involved with corruption and graft after his or her election or even before, if he or she is a public servant?

In the interview, Ma also pointed out his policy of “no unification” with China does not rule out the option of unification.

What does it mean, then?

Of course, they are slips of the tongue. Perhaps the president was so impatient and eager to restart the reform he didn't carry out during his brief previous stint as party chairman that he made the gaffes. He wants the Kuomintang to be really clean. He had to quit as chairman and suspend the reform on February 13, 2007 after he had been indicted for corruption, charged with misappropriating his expenses while he was mayor of Taipei from 1998 to 2006.

He was tried and finally exonerated by the Supreme Court shortly after he had been elected. He wants to be vindicated, suing for perjury the public prosecutor who indicted him. He claimed Hou Kuan-jen changed the statements by witnesses in order to prosecute him.

The Taipei district court is considering Ma's appeal for trying Hou without indictment, and the president told the official Central News Agency in another exclusive interview he is suing Hou as Citizen Ma Ying-jeou, because the case had been initiated long before he was elected president.

But the real purpose in his doubling as the chairman is to make all Kuomintang lawmakers toe his new party line to improve the track record of his government in order to pave the way for Ma's reelection in 2012. It doesn't please all 81 legislators of the ruling party. Many of them fear he may become a “new strongman” in the image of his one-time mentor President Chiang Ching-kuo.

That's why he had to declare in the CommonWealth interview the days of a strongman are over. He denied he would be a strongman but had to admit the lawmakers and the party that controls them by means of nomination for reelection would have to work closely together with the administration, using as the platform its central standing committee under his personal leadership.

It's easier said than done. Contentious legislators won't meekly submit. Those bad, old days of a subservient parliament and an autocratic party are over, too. They are not lemmings following their leader in jumping off the cliff into the Arctic Ocean.

On the other hand, it was totally unnecessary for President Ma to deny this and give any explanations. For all the lawmakers and party apparatchiks know full well he cannot be an autocratic president cum chairman, even if he tries.

All this has prompted Fredrick Chien, a former speaker of the now defunct National Assembly and president of the Control Yuan, to warn Ma against doubling as chairman of the Kuomintang. “If Mr. Ma asked me, I would tell him not to take the concurrent job of party chairman,” said Chien, who at one time taught a student called Ma Ying-jeou.