It is amazing and wonderful to see the former president, who led Taiwan for 12 years after succeeding Chiang Ching-kuo, still healthy and actively campaigning at 86 years of age.

However, President Lee has taken to stretching the truth when it comes to defending his own record and criticizing others.

Speaking to a crowd on Friday, Lee declared that it is not right for a former president to criticize the incumbent president.

As soon as that sentence left his mouth, Lee launched a tirade against current President Ma Ying-jeou and the ruling Kuomintang.

According to Lee, Ma and the KMT have performed so poorly that the voters should “punish” them when they go to the polls for the year-end local government elections.

Naturally, Lee encouraged voters to choose candidates from his Taiwan Solidarity Union, whose fortunes have declined sharply since the number of elected lawmakers was slashed in half starting in 2008.

Lee claimed that Ma has failed to understand the hardships that ordinary people are suffering amid the ongoing global economic slowdown and high unemployment.

He also said he was against Ma's policy of “tying up” Taiwan's economy with mainland China and that the disastrous flooding in the wake of Typhoon Morakot was the “straw that broke the camel's back” prompting him to make a stand against President Ma's government.

Lee also laughed at the KMT's recent decision to overturn and redo the just-conducted Central Standing Committee election amid allegations of gift-giving and vote-buying by some of the winners.

He said it was probably the “first time in history” that the KMT had ever taken such a step and blamed Ma for losing his ability to lead the party.

Lee's harshest words were saved for the government's decision to permit imports of American beef.

When a reporter asked him if he personally ate U.S. beef, Lee carefully responded by declaring he didn't eat “sick beef.” Many of the former president's complaints have indeed been leveled at Ma and the KMT by others.

And with elections right around the corner, it is even understandable for Lee to be liberal with the facts as he tries to help his small party stage a comeback.

But as a former president and chairman of the KMT for no less than 12 years, Lee should know better than to talk out of the side of his mouth.

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.