Shooting the messenger

The Wall Street Journal made keen observations last week about Václav Klaus's overt, sometimes uninformed defense of Putin's Russia, as well as about Klaus's hesitance to recognize Kosovo, but the U.S. newspaper made the amateur mistake of confusing the CR with Slovakia in terms of the "sizable Hungarian minority that has been a periodic source of tension with its neighbor to the south." This allowed Industry Minister Martin Říman to dismiss the entire article as an example of how the view of "complicated Central Europe" from a few thousand kilometers away isn't necessarily always accurate. Říman dismissed the U.S. State Dept.'s critical 2007 Human Rights Report with the same wave of the hand, as did PM Mirek Topolánek. As for Klaus, his staff left the critical Journal piece off the Professor's web page. Sometimes the best way to kill bearers of negative news is to ignore them.