Close your eyes. No, not
literally or you won’t be able to follow me. Imagine a national population made up entirely of Republicans, only less pulchritudinous. It’s a nation in which the only dissident lives abroad, protesters are nonexistent and nothing that George Bush does is ever examined in the least or ever criticized, a nation in which the inhabitants name streets and their children after him, devote three stamps to him and who think that everything he does is some way absolutely infallible and marvelous.
Sounds like a fairy land place, doesn’t it, kind of like Kansas only with more donkeys? Well, such a place exists and it’s called Albania and
Curious George is visiting it today.
Leave it to George Bush to reap the benefits of something that was facilitated by Bill Clinton eight years ago today. And just think: Bush’s flaks didn’t even have to weed out any evil liberals and progressives as in his public appearances here at home. In fact, the
NY Times did this:
A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.
I guess only the opinions of "prominent" people count, not the proles.
The appreciation that none of Bush’s 42 predecessors had even bothered to visit them has been conveniently lost on the Albanians, as has the fact that, before this week, Bush had hardly ever mentioned the need for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.
But what else can you expect from a country that’s completely unable to distinguish between the Democratic Clinton administration that helped end a war and a genocide and the Republican Bush administration that got them into a needless war in Iraq and a genocide that had nothing to do with them or their interests?