Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
In recent days, you may have heard about a scandal involving President of South Korea Park Geun Hye, one that goes beyond even the norm of her scandalous tenure thus far. While Asian Junkie is a site generally for the entertainment world, something this significant is bound to bleed over (it already has to an extent) into entertainment and people have been asking me about it for a hot minute as it is.
Honestly, I have nothing new to contribute to the discourse after reading Ask A Korean‘s breakdown, so you should go read that. Even if you have no interest in politics, if you were #TeamSchadenfreude at any point, you’ll have interest in this story anyway.
President Park Geun-hye is deep trouble. The stories have been out for a few days now, and even the English-language papers have caught on. Park’s confidant has been running a massive slush fund, as she extorted more than $70 million from Korea’s largest corporations. The confidant was receiving confidential policy briefings and draft presidential speeches–all on a totally unencrypted computer.
Korean people have come to expect corruption from their presidents. So why is this one by Park Geun-hye causing such a strong reaction? It is not because Korean people discovered that Park was corrupt; it is because they discovered Park was irrationally corrupt. Koreans are not being dismayed at the scale of the corruption; they are shocked to see what the scale of the corruption signifies.
What does he mean by “irrationally corrupt”? Read on.
Stranger than fiction, honestly.
