When Donald Trump won the US presidential elections last year, Prime Minister Edi Rama’s statements on CNN’s “Quest Means Business” came back like a boomerang. Having bet on the wrong horse, Rama suddenly had to justify his diplomatic faux-pas of interfering in foreign elections to someone he had called half a year earlier “harmful” to the democratic world.
Of course, no one is denying this fact. Trump’s election, if anything, shows the serious flaws in the American democratic process and it remains to be seen how soon the US will recover from the havoc his government is currently wreaking on its political institutions. It’s just that foreign leaders should be careful not to interfere in the internal politics of other countries. Rama’s other adventure, with Macedonian internal politics, had pushed the country into a total political crisis.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that Rama attacking Trump on CNN doesn’t come even close to opposition leader Lulzim Basha’s pathetic, whiny, and utterly misplaced “exclusive” interview in “alt-right,” racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, nationalist, fascist “news” website Breitbart.
I have no patience to actually explain the role of this website in the ascendance of Trump as US President, its affiliations with its former director and current Trump Assistant Steve Bannon, its support for Vichy “faggot” (I can say this, I am one myself) Milo Yiannopoulos, or its “journalistic” model of fact-free, conspiracy theory-driven slander.
I don’t have to explain this, dear reader, because you are most probably not in the near future going to give an interview to this leaking bag of rhetorical puss. So don’t worry. Not so Lulzim Basha! Of all the media outlets available to him for his United States compassion-with-the-Albanian-opposition tour, he picks literally the worst one to give an “exclusive” interview to.
And what does Basha say in this interview?
Albania is in a unique and difficult situation, in a political crisis, the results of a full onslaught of organized crime on all state structures, on the rule of law, and democracy.
Very nice, Lulzim, were it not that Breitbart doesn’t give a single fuck about “rule of law” or “democracy.” What it does care about is redefining “rule of law” as “right to bear arms” and “democracy” as “authoritarianism.”
One may be surprised that a politician whose political fantasy world is late-1990s Dutch consensus politics during an economical boom would choose such an outlet to gather foreign “support” in the idle hope that the US government, under the pressure of a few Republican senators, would fire US Ambassador Donald Lu and replace him with political appointment more interested in Albania’s oil reserves than human rights.
Is he really thinking that supporting Breitbart’s anti-Soros campaign, which is basically just the repackaged anti-Semitic fairytale of the Jewish capitalist puppet master, is going to give him more street cred for a government that has lost every sense of moral decency?
And even if successful, what type of politics is this? Haven’t we grown up from jumping from Mussolini to Tito to Stalin to Mao, from one foreign “protector” to other? How pathetic is it, that rather than sitting down at the negotiation table, he is gathering a few dimwitted Republican extremists (Ted Cruz, ladies and gentlemen!) to push for a policy change in Washington.
This is what Basha got in return for selling what is left of his soul. Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who openly advocated changing borders in the Balkans and divvying up Macedonia, saying this:
If we are going to defeat radical Islam and have a stable Europe, we need someone who can get the job done. Luzlim Basha, whom I have known for some time, is just the person to get that job done.
Right! Lulzim Basha, child of Dutch tolerance and open society rebranding himself as defender of Christianity against Radical Islam. That will certainly do the job!
Actually, none of this should surprise us. At the end of the day, what members of Congress can you expect to meet when your fixer is Fatmir Mediu, the homophobic frontman of the Republican Party, who campaigned to recriminalize homosexuality in 2013? Fatmir Mediu, the former Minister of Defense who didn’t serve one day in jail for the Gërdec ammunition depot explosion in 2008 that killed 26 people?
I really do want to believe in the goodness of people. I want to believe in the goodness of Lulzim Basha, too. But when you give such a clear sign that the values of democracy and a passion for truth are irrelevant in the eye of gaining the political upper hand by leveraging the worst ideological forces available on the global market, you have shown yourself unfit to lead any “resistance.”
I hope you enjoy your tent.
