In the movie The Dead Zone, Christopher Walken’s character Johnny Smith is gifted (or cursed) with the power to see the future, which he accidentally uses to discover that a senatorial candidate will one day become a Hitler-like president of America. After some moral searching, Johnny assassinates the candidate before he can unleash nuclear Armageddon.
Of course, the moral equation would be pretty easy to solve if someone happened to have completely reliable powers of precognition*. But what if Johnny’s precognitive powers were accurate only 80% of the time? How about 50%? Ten? Would assassination still be justifiable? And suppose Johnny was just a jobless, clinically-depressed nutcase, over-reacting to outrageous political hyperbole, something along the lines of this?
Yes, that’s right. That’s a KMT rally, with an effigy demonizing Taiwan’s president by dressing him in Nazi garb. So, when a political party likens the country’s president to Hitler and Osama bin Laden, and one of its less stable followers goes over the edge because he fails to realize that you really meant that in a GOOD WAY, who ya gonna blame?
Why the victim, of course! The president must have faked his own shooting!
One of the big tragedies here is that they never took the assassin alive. Instead, when he realized that police had found the black market dealer who sold him the weapon, he destroyed much of the evidence and committed suicide. The police did manage to wiretap the family afterwards however, and when confronted with some of their incriminating conversations, they decided to ‘fess up.
That was about a year ago. The March 13th edition of the Taiwan News had an update in a story entitled "Shooter’s wife says ‘coerced’ to tell the truth" (Sorry, I can’t find the link). A couple of days ago, the KMT was to hold a big, expensive rally against the abolition of the National Unification Council, and discovered that a lot of people just couldn’t muster much outrage over the abolition of a council with a $30 a year budget which hadn’t met in ten years. Lo and behold, the wife of the assassin came forward just in time for the Chen hate-fest to recant her confession, informing the press that, ahem:
…it was not until some "nice people" presented her family with evidence that her husband had been framed that her family started to realize that the investigation closed last August was all about "judicial persecution" and was nothing short of a "savage act" against their human rights.
So the KMT Big Lie about the "stolen presidential election" is about to be told again. And again. What I AM curious to know is exactly what "evidence" the "nice people" happened to give her. It wouldn’t by chance have been presented in a big, ol’ red envelope**, would it?
For more on this, I would recommend Michael Turton’s The View from Taiwan, which covers it very well. It even has comparison photos of the now-deceased perpetrator alongside security camera shots, which should convince all but the most dyed-in-the-wool grassy knoll conspiracy geeks that the police fingered the right man. Plenty of links, too.
One final note: the daughter of the assassin points to the surveillance camera recording of the perpetrator, and claims that her father is innocent:
"[The man in the tape is bald.***] My father was not bald…he just had a high forehead."
Boy, if I had a nickel every time I heard my old man say THAT…
* We can wonder whether Johnny didn’t have other options open to him for stopping the candidate from becoming president, short of assassination. However, for the purposes of a Stephen King thriller, it might have been less than dramatically satisfying if the protagonist had merely founded a Stop Stillson! grassroots political organization.
** In Taiwan, gifts of money are customarily placed inside red envelopes.
*** Closer inspection of the grainy security camera pictures provided at The View from Taiwan seem to suggest that the perpetrator was not in fact bald, but that his hair was reflecting light from the sun. Click the link and judge for yourself, though.
UPDATE (Mar 15/06): A commenter raised a couple great points that merit repeating:
…did you notice the contradiction in this statement:
"…it was not until some "nice people" presented her family with evidence that her husband had been framed that her family started to realize that the investigation closed last August was all about "judicial persecution" and was nothing short of a "savage act" against their human rights."
The contradiction, of course, is that she couldn’t have been "coerced" if she didn’t realize that she was being persecuted until later. What’s more, why did the family burn both the suicide notes that didn’t look like suicide notes and the yellow jacket (that didn’t look like the yellow jacket shown in the video)? This evidence, afterall, helps the family (if they are telling the truth). (emphasis added)
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As I pointed out in a couple of blogs, did you notice the contradiction in this statement:
…it was not until some “nice people” presented her family with evidence that her husband had been framed that her family started to realize that the investigation closed last August was all about “judicial persecution” and was nothing short of a “savage act” against their human rights.
The contradiction, of course, is that she couldn’t have been “coerced” if she didn’t realize that she was being persecuted until later. What’s more, why did the family burn both the suicide notes that didn’t look like suicide notes and the yellow jacket (that didn’t look like the yellow jacket shown in the video)? This evidence, afterall, helps the family (if they are telling the truth).
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