On the bright side, another country has beaten us to the punch of electing a First! Woman! President! - and she is a nationalist after the late Chiang Kai-shek's own heart:
Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan's main opposition party will become the island's first female president in a landslide victory over the ruling Kuomintang Saturday, as voters turned their backs on closer [Red] China ties.
KMT candidate Eric Chu conceded defeat in a disastrous rout for the party, addressing tearful crowds at the party's headquarters in Taipei.
The vote count is continuing but live television figures from polling stations show Tsai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has secured a historic landslide victory, with around 60% against 30% for Chu.
That would be the biggest ever win for any president in Taiwan -- the previous record was 58.45% for current KMT president Ma Ying-jeou in 2008.
The reasons for the Kuomintang's crushing defeat ought to sound very familiar to us, and indicate that the Taiwanese electorate, in stark contrast to its American counterpart, retains a measurable quotient of rationality:
Support for Tsai has surged as voters have become increasingly uneasy about a recent rapprochement with [Red] China under Ma, who must step down after a maximum two terms.
As the economy stagnates, many are frustrated that trade pacts signed with the mainland have failed to benefit ordinary Taiwanese....
Jubilant crowds gathered at the DPP headquarters in Taipei, where Tsai was due to speak later Saturday.
Vendors were selling everything from cups to key chains bearing Tsai's image.
One small group held up a banner saying: "Taiwan is not part of [Red] China. Support Taiwan independence."
"[Red] China has no right to claim Taiwan and we want to say that to the world," said one member of the group, Angela Shi, who returned from San Francisco to vote.
If there were an American POTUS on the other side of the Pacific, President Tsai could be a staunch and stalwart U.S. Pacific rim ally, perhaps even the equivalent of the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher relationship thirty years ago standing firm against another Evil Empire.
Unfortunately, we have Xi Jing Ping's poodle at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, so the Taiwanese are about to become just another set of victims:
In effect, the prevention of Taiwan going independent is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the Chinese communist regime. Chi[Comm] leaders believe that, if they were to let Taiwan go independent and not respond, they would probably be overthrown by their own nationalistic people. Therefore, I think they would be willing to engage in what [Barack Obama will] call “self-defeating military adventures” in order to prevent that result, even if they knew they were going to lose.
Which they have absolutely no reason to believe they will.
So in my view, the key problem for the United States is how to deter the PRC from using force against Taiwan. We have to be very clear about that, because I think the United States would intervene if force were used under most circumstances I can imagine.
Are you kidding, Mr. Lampton? On what planet are you inhaling? Taiwan is on its own, and you know it.
But on the other hand, we have to deter Taiwan from engaging in such risky behavior that they precipitate an attack that will be destabilizing to Asia, destroy the Taiwan economy and drag the United States into a regional conflict.
Too late. Looks like the Taiwanese have more and bigger balls than we Obamerikastanis will ever be able to tolerate. But Lampton isn't wrong about a ChiComm-Taiwan war, and Beijing attacking us as well. They have threatened to seize Hawaii over our even tepid support for Taiwan in the recent past. And now they've got the ability to make it happen.
So this is what "being at the level of the rest of the world" is like. Kinda sucks, doesn't it?
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