President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have found themselves dragged into the political mess that is the result of former Executive Yuan secretary-general Lin Yi-shih’s (林益世) allegedly being caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Their backpedaling tactics and lame promises to crack down on corruption are pretty obvious, but the worst consequence is the sudden outbreak of tensions between Taiwan and Japan, one of the nation’s closest allies, over a few rocks in the Pacific that both sides claim as their sovereign territory.