Rev. Moon, Neil Bush and Taiwan

CommonDreams today linked an interesting article on Presidential brother Neil Bush, who has been traveling all over Asia recently with the Moonie cult leader Sun Myung Moon, including our fair isle:

As the president was trumpeting a 35-page National Security Council document titled "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq", Neil has been touting his company's prospectus. Over the past six months, Neil Bush has been shepherded around several former Soviet republics by a man wanted for fraud by Russian authorities, and has showed up in the Philippines and Taiwan at the side of a self-styled messiah.

Neil Bush will do anything with anyone, as both articles note:

Reverend Moon is the latest in a line of unusual partners for Neil Bush in recent years, including the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and fugitive Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who has been promoting the younger Bush's educational software company, Ignite!, according to the Washington Post.

and CommonDreams points out, comically:

Stained by his involvement in the savings and loan debacle, Neil Bush's reputation was further soiled by revelations contained in a deposition that was part of his divorce from his wife Sharon. In those documents, Bush revealed details about rewarding business deals and a series of sexual encounters with women in Asia.

Sharon Bush's lawyer, Marshall Davis Brown, questioned Bush about an August 2002 contract with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, that would pay him two million dollars in stock over five years: "You have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors do you?"

"That's correct," Bush responded.

"And you have absolutely over the last 10, 15, 20 years not a lot of demonstrable business experience that would bring about a company investing two million dollars in you?" Brown persisted.

In the deposition, Bush also admitted to having had a series of sexual encounters with Asian woman, while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong. According to Bush, the women knocked on his door, entered and engaged in sex with him. According to a CNN report, Bush "said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them".

Apparently Neil has been rubbing elbows with a number of Taiwan's leaders, as Alternet observes. Their article says:

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel" dream. As he describes it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God's plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.

This tunnel would connect Alaska to Russia. Moon is not the first person to have imagined such a project, as Harry Turtledove wrote a great SF novel about a tunnel under the Atlantic, and before he got lost in Xanth, Piers Anthony pictured a trans-Pacific tunnel in his classic trilogy Battle Circle. It's a shame Moon thinks so small, eh? Meanwhile Moon apparently wowed 'em in Taipei:

The Taiwan paper similarly revealed high-powered support for Moon, describing Republic of China Vice President Annette Lu as listening "rapt" to his speech.

I'll bet Annette was just jealous that Moon not only had his own set of worshippers, but was able to say even crazier things than she does, such as claiming that Caucasians are descended from polar bears.

"The white race is descended from polar bears. Animals blend with the environment for camouflage. In the same way, the white race appears as they do because their ancestors lived in the wilderness of snow, and looking for water their eyes became the color of water, blue. Caucasian hair is many colors, because there are many colors in the environment. The coloring is not God's creation but due to the environment. They had to hunt everyday, so they became excited about seeing blood. So the white race history has always been stained by blood. Who eliminated the American Indians? White people. How can we understand that? The white race is the polar bear race. They came through the Scandinavian Peninsula and to Great Britain, the island of pirates. In what can you take pride? They tried to conquer the world."

No matter what Annette says, she will never be able to match that. The Taipei Times covered the story on 12/2:

Moon Sun-myung, founder of South Korea's Unification Church, was in Taiwan on Wednesday to launch a global peace campaign and promote the formation of "ideal families."

Ideal families? Yeesh.

[Taiwan] [Bush]