hankyoreh

The recent discovery of mad cow disease in the United States is bringing out everything ugly in the Lee Myung-bak administration: its irresponsibility, falsehoods, flip-flopping, and prevarications. Despite knowing that it could not carry out an immediate import suspension even if mad cow disease (BSE) was found in the US, the government hoodwinked the people of South Korea with newspaper advertisements and a statement by then Prime Minister Han Seung-soo. A hundred apologies to the public would not be enough at this point. It is quite something, then, to see the government rebuking and browbeating the public instead.
Blue House spokesman Park Jung-ha responded to charges that the government went back on its promise to halt imports if BSE occurred in the US by saying, “You should read the Prime Minister’s statement more carefully.” His argument is that the agreement was to halt imports if it was determined that public health was endangered by BSE in the US, and that nothing was said about the suspension being immediate. It was the very image of the unethical corporation pulling one over on consumers with cleverly worded terms of agreement. Apparently, our government is a top practitioner of the shoddy tactic of sneaking in terms that are unfavorable to the consumer and then, when a problem arises later, shrugging and saying, “You should have read the fine print.”
Park even said with a straight face that the government’s false advertisements were “truncated and compressed in their wording.” In other words, pity the poor member of the public who didn‘t recognize false advertising when they saw it. Obviously, there was nothing wrong with the advertisement itself. He even went on about “Internet urban legends” that “distort the facts.”
We now find ourselves in a situation where anyone who says the wrong thing about the government’s newspaper advertisements could be arrested for spreading “groundless rumors.”
Agriculture Minister Suh Kyu-yong said yesterday that he had concluded, based on an examination of the response sent by the US, that there was no reason to halt quarantine inspections. Rather this putting citizen health first and conducting an investigation where everything is up for questioning, his attitude is one of “If the US say it’s okay, it’s okay.” New Frontier Party lawmaker-elect Kim Jong-hoon, who was Minister for Trade at the time of the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement negotiations, upbraided the public for what he saw as an undue fuss, saying, “It’s over the top to talk about risks to citizen health rights over a single dairy cow.” It was the Lee Myung-bak administration that put the country’s major overseas negotiations and citizen health in the hands of such irresponsible people.
President Lee stands at the peak of this particular pyramid. At a Cabinet meeting on May 13, 2008, he patted himself on the back after the US government agreed to the content of the Prime Minister’s statement. If he knew the truth and lied anyway, then he is a “liar president.” If he only received false reports from down the line, then he is quite simply incompetent. Rather than trying to stonewall his way out of this, we hope to see him voicing a clear position on the matter. If he thinks he can weather the storm without a genuine apology for the government’s defrauding of the people and a suspension of US beef imports, then he has another thing coming.
　
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]