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Growing up in Texas, occasionally the legislators would get so cranked up over some issue confronting the state that they would, as we used to say, “go to fist city.” But as far as I know, brawls in the Texas State Legislature were mere slugfests. This week in Seoul, National Assembly member Kim Sun-Dong, a member of the Democratic Labor Party, stepped it up a notch, chucking a tear gas canister at the speaker’s podium. Although the DLP is supposed to be a left-wing party, the video below clearly shows that Kim is no southpaw. I’d love to see the video of the subsequent pat-down. What else was he packing? Brass-knuckles? A pair of nunchaku? A loaded 9mm handgun?
Sohn Hak-kyu, opposition Democratic Party presidential frontrunner, doubled-down with the extraordinary claim, reported by Evan Ramstad in the Wall Street Journal, that passage of the KORUS agreement, supported by a majority of the South Korean public—not the tear gas throwing—was “an act of violence” and if elected “We will declare the agreement invalid.”
The decline of Sohn and the South Korean left more generally is a sad one. First a member of the conservative ruling party, then touted as a new, centrist representative of the progressives in the mold of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair, Sohn initially supported KORUS before switching sides. Now he appears to be little more than an opportunistic, grasping populist. The anti-KORUS shenanigans of the Democratic Party are even more shameful when it is remembered that the KORUS agreement was an initiative of progressive Roh Moo-hyun, and negotiated by the forerunner of Sohn’s own party, though according to Wikileaks, this flip-flop was predicted by former President Kim Dae-jung.
