PRINCETON, New Jersey -- Taiwan's public prosecutor has indicted the wife of President Chen Shui-bian for embezzling public funds. Chen, as a sitting president, cannot be indicted even though the prosecutor says he has evidence to prove his guilt. But Chen's legacy was already in tatters.
Chen can remain in office until his term ends in 2008, or he could resign now to let his vice president and pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) rebuild to win the next election. Whatever his decision, Taiwan's first DPP president will go down in history as a pathetic failure, because he used his office to divide the island's citizens, as if his domestic political opponents were Taiwan's mortal enemies.
The root of Chen's moral demise is something the classical Greeks identified: hubris. Chen's popularity among his party followers, whose fervency often bordered on fundamentalism, changed him from a person with deep democratic instincts into a textbook case of a man who regards power and its prerogatives as his by right.
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