I had not heard much about Klaus until about a month ago when The New York Times ran a hatchet job of an article about him.

I knew I smelled a rat or two in the article but couldn’t explain exactly how many. The next day Newsbusters reported that “New York Times European correspondent Dan Bilefsky bizarrely relayed the contents of a secret police file from the former Communist state of Czechoslovakia to boost his argument that Vaclav Klaus,the new president of the European Union, is a dangerously arrogant proponent of the free market.”

When I read that I became a lot more fond of Klaus. But when I read this in Investors Business Daily, I actually started to feel something akin to the audacity of hopeychanginess:

“But this is nothing new. In 2003, Arie Oostlander, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, lamented that “the worst thing that the Czechs could have done was to elect to the presidency a follower of Margaret Thatcher.”

Yet Klaus, a student of the great F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, is exactly the sort of leader that Europe has to have. The liberty-minded defender of free markets has the opportunity to rock the continent out of its self-inflicted economic malaise.”