Mark Karlin for BuzzFlash: Hungarian Dictator Viktor Orbán Described by Washington Post in a Blistering Two Paragraphs, Which Could Have Been Written About Trump. The WP Didn't Get the Irony.
Hungarian demagogue Viktor Orbán foreshadows what a 2024 Republican presidency would be like, whether it be Trump or one of his acolytes vying to lead his cult. (European People's Party)
July 25, 2021
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Although a recent Washington Post commentary ended up criticizing Orban for his use of the Pegasus Israeli spyware, the first two paragraphs could have been written about Trump as president. The Post, however, did not acknowledge the parallel:
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, was already seen as a boogeyman stalking the West. In nearly a dozen years in power, he has transformed his nation’s fledgling liberal democracy into a thorn in the side of the European Union. Critics accuse Orban of presiding over a “post-communist mafia state,” where the media is dominated by his allies, the courts are stacked with his loyalists, the electoral map gerrymandered in favor of his right-wing Fidesz party and a network of kleptocratic patronage traces its way back to the prime minister.
Then there’s his politics: Orban styles himself as the continent’s great illiberal and grandstands ceaselessly over the perceived evils of immigration, multiculturalism, feminism and European integration. He has at various times been accused of peddling anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and anti-Roma sentiment. A new Hungarian anti-LGBTQ law so incensed Orban’s European counterparts that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared at a recent meeting of E.U. leaders that Hungary should leave the bloc if it can’t respect gay rights. As is his wont, Orban scoffed at the moral scolding, decrying Rutte’s “colonial approach.”
Uh, if written about Trump, or the similarities noted, it would be the most accurate description of the former president that ever appeared in the Post. The sheer astonishment expressed for Orban as a threat to the democratic norms of Europe could at best be called negligently ironic.
As Thom Hartmann warned in an article posted on BuzzFlash in January of 2020, “If You Want a Preview of What Four More Years of Trump Could Bring, Visit Hungary, Home of Right-Wing Strongman Viktor Orbán.”:
In a rally three months before his White House meeting, Orbán said that countries that accept refugees are producing “mixed-race nations.”
Orbán is now back in Hungary, ruthlessly using his own nation’s diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having hired his own local versions of Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.
Before you say, “It can’t happen here,” you may want to make a trip to Budapest.
Democracy was saved for the time being by a sliver of votes. The Republicans, however, are constructing a voting apparatus that is paving the way for a Viktor Orbán-style president in 2024, whether it be Trump or one of his mini-mes. If this were to happen, and it will without federally-guaranteed voting rights, then The Washington Post Will know the full meaning of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
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