Yes, Vaclav Klaus is pretty cool

I seem to be answering a lot of questions in my blog post titles today. The question comes from Jay Nordlinger at NRO’s Corner blog. He’s at Davos, the site of the World Economic Forum right now (Vandy alum and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is currently featured on the Web site), and spoke with Czech president Vaclav Klaus at a meeting of journalists. Klaus is the founder and former leader of the right-of-center party ODS in the Czech Republic, and he is vehemently against the idea of global warming and government involvement in stopping it.

Nordlinger reports some of Klaus’s comments today about Al Gore and the global warming crowd that try to paint non-believers as something akin to Holocaust deniers. Klaus is also anti-regulation and pro-free market, which certainly makes him an anomoly among European heads of state. This particularly agitates the Euro crowd since he’s the President of the European Union for this six month period. Here’s Nordlinger and the relevant question:

I will have more Klaus in the Davos Journal next week. By the way, is there a national leader today whom you respect more?

Nah, not really. He stands up to the left-wing status quo of Europe and probably shakes things up big time at things like the World Economic Forum. He may be a bit radical and certainly runs his mouth a bit more than he probably should, but he reminds me of Bush in the way that he says what he believes.

When I was in Prague last June, we were spending lots of time with old allies of the Czech Republic’s first president, Vaclav Havel. Klaus is basically they’re political enemy in the Czech Republic, but they are surprisingly close in ideology from my vantage point; Klaus’s ODS is only more economically liberal (in the classical sense). Good stuff all around.