Their long national nightmare is over

Following record low voter turnout, Yonhap has Lee Myung Bak winning by a landslide with over 50%. This is unbad. I always root for a lying stock manipulator over a lying abettor of genocide with untamed abandon. I can hear the celebratory gunfire all the way out in Centerville. I’m also pleasantly surprised that the video proving that Lee fibbed his way through the BBK scandal didn’t mush up the prospect of any one candidate getting a mandate.

The best news of the election? Comrade Chung, the poster-boy for propping up Kim Jong Il and slamming the furnace door on his wretched subjects, has now led two leftist parties to record-breaking beat-downs. He drew just 26% of the vote. Chung also led the Uri Party to defeat in the summer of 2006, and that defeat eventually destroyed Uri. There’s a good chance that this lopsided defeat will destroy its successor, the United New Democratic Party. Chung had a well deserved reputation for shallowness, but let’s not forget that he was also a conniving, black-hearted demagogue (three links) whose mouth emitted words of breathtaking stupidity whenever it wasn’t otherwise occupied in fellating Kim Jong Il.

At least it’s possible to say that for now, appeasing North Korea and bashing Uncle Sam don’t have the voter appeal they did five years ago. I am not too cynical to deny that one thing will improve, which is the volume of Yankee-baiting cheap shots from the Blue House.

The worst news of the election? South Korea missed its chance to have a national conversation about The Big Issue, unification. The campaign was really about which candidate was the most repellent, and with the abundance of such exquisite material on that question, there wasn’t much time to talk about when, how, and on what terms Korea should resolve that nation’s most fundamental question. There wasn’t even much discussion about the smaller issues that devolve from The Big Issue: refugees, concentration camps, nuclear disarmament, defense policy, conventional disarmament, reconstruction planning, or humanitarian aid policy.
Flashback: The Lee Myung Bak Dossier, from September 2005.
Much, much more: Andy Jackson, bless his heart, semi-live-blogged this.

SO NOW I WONDER, WHAT SOUTH KOREA WILL WE GET FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS?