The summer heat and the presumably missing air conditioning in Taiwanese prisons is taking a serious toll on the few remaining functioning brain cells of Chen Shui-Bian, Taiwan's ex-president.

Even after being sentenced to life in prison for a long list of crimes including embezzlement and laundering of millions of dollars he remains convinced of his innocence, notwithstanding friends and family members testifying against him.

With the help of his indefatigable supporters (who, I assume, now have nothing to laund... pardon, do) he has come up with another cunning plan to escape life behind bars: Sue Obama.

It's almost too good to be true. If this doesn't turn out to be yet another sloppily researched story cooked up by the Taiwanese media, then this is my favorite news of the year (right up there with Crocs in trouble).

For the fans of insanity, here are two of the original articles reporting the story:

Wu Shu-jhen and her son visit Chen Shui-bian in prison (Formosa News, 2009-09-22)
阿扁出怪招　要隔海控告歐巴馬！扁：我願到美國作證 (Yahoo! News, 2009-09-22)

I ordinarily restrain myself whenever I feel the urge to blog about politics. One of the reasons is the sheer amount of political events that literally shout to be blogged about. Another one is the sheer amount of blogs that already take care of that outcry. But the main reason is that I don't think the whole world is looking for my opinion on politics. Then again, only a ridiculously tiny fraction of the world is reading my blog, so here we go ... :-)

From the perspective of a foreigner, Taiwanese politics is interesting on many levels and brings up a variety of reactions in me.

My favorite is the ‘‘‘"I wish the Swiss parliament could achieve that"‘‘‘ because it confirms my decision to live abroad. (Not that I was escaping Switzerland on purpose - it just so happened, - but it's a good feeling anyway.) This happens, for example, when smoking in many public spaces is banned in the whole of Taiwan while in Switzerland this is a process that takes years of debate and votes in each individual canton and is still not complete thanks to a bunch of simple-minded gastronomy and tobacco company representatives (and their represented simpletons) who think a minority's choice to smoke is more important than the cancer-free bodies of the rest of the population.

The opposite reaction is the ‘‘‘"I want to go to Taipei and smack someone over the head" ‘‘‘. It happens quite a bit and in the majority of times it's a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that I want to slap. The reason I don't do it is that it would make me no better than their own. And it would be a step backward because it's not too long ago that the Taiwanese parliament was a stage for fist fights on a regular basis.

Yet another one is the ‘‘‘"My lifelong search for irony has reached a new climax"‘‘‘ and that shall be the subject of today's post. But before I explain what happened I need to give you a little background. (Disclaimer: This is the impression I couldn't help but getting in the last two years that I've lived in Taiwan. Therefore, this may be biased by my open-minded, logic and truth searching perception.)

Many DPP members are still very angry about losing the legislative election in early 2008 and the presidential election a few months later to the Kuomintang party (KMT). The previous eight years of DPP government had been landmarked by great achievements such as:

• Temporarily stopping the construction of a nuclear plant for political reasons forcing the government to spend millions of tax dollars on breach of contract payments.

• Renaming the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall, once again at huge cost for the Taiwanese tax payers. (By the way, does this remind anyone else of Freedom fries?) Also, the memorial hall was partially closed and covered by ugly scaffolding for years, officially because of renovation work, but together with the cancelling of the guard ceremonies it seemed to be part of their general plan to destroy or make unattractive anything involving Chaing Kai-shek.

• Their president and his extended family organizing a huge money embezzlement scheme, once again at the cost of the Taiwanese people.

• Switching the Romanization system, which is the way how the Chinese language is transcribed into the Roman alphabet, from the widely used Hanyu Pinyin to Tongyong Pinyin. Aside from the unnecessary cost such changes create (do you see a pattern here?), they also render a huge service to Chinese learners like myself when the whole world adopts one system and one political party of a small country adopts another. Even Taiwanese are confused by the different systems to the extent where most of them cannot read or write Pinyin. (I'm not sure whether this would be different if the government stuck with one system but that's a story for another day because the topic is fairly complex.)

The list goes on and on. The bottom line is that all these things were, of course, done for the good of the Taiwanese people. And, as it happens for representative democracies, the currently elected people know for sure what's best for their voters. In the case of the DPP the best is protecting the country and its democracy from China and, mainly, their opposing party. Sentences like “the opposition wants to sell Taiwan to communist China” are part of the standard repertoire of any DPP politician.

Ironically, and now we're getting back to my favorite topic, they are rather generous when it comes to interpreting democracy. When Jackie Chan recently pulled off yet another one of his foot-in-mouth stunts the DPP suggested creating a law to withdraw funding from the Deaflympics if they didn't replace him as a spokesman.

Everybody knows that the Chinese Communist Party is not a big proponent of freedom of speech, but from a party that carries the word "Democratic" in its name and spends the better part of its energy into fanning fear of communism that's pretty ironic. (And even if you don't like irony you have to wonder why a sports event should suffer because politicians disagree with actors.)

I guess it's time to read up on democracy's fundamental values or for a name change. Given their recent achievements the latter one looks like less trouble. I suggest DYOCP: Democratic Yet Opportunistically Communistic Party. Rolls right off your tongue.