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The Belgian Minister of Defense, Pieter De Crem, also widely known as “Crembo”, has been in the news over the past couple of weeks. During a visit to the United States earlier this month, obviously with a whole delegation of his department, he visited a bar in New York. He was spotted by a Dutch woman who was working in that bar. According to her, the minister was very drunk, and one of his collaborators told her they had come to New York for a couple of meetings with people from the United Nations. Unfortunately, these meetings had been canceled a couple of days earlier because these U.N.-guys were having other meetings to attend in Geneva, Switserland, but the Belgians had decided to go to New York anyway, because it was so “quite” in Brussels and some of the members of the delegation had never been to the Big Apple before.

So Nathalie Lubbe Bakker, the Dutch lady, wrote about this the next day on her weblog. Somehow, the Belgian press found out, they wrote about it, the department of defense denied the story and called it gossip, collaborators of Crembo called the owner of the bar in New York, and Nathalie Lubbe Bakker was fired the next day she came to work.

Earlier this week, Pieter De Crem was invited to come to the Belgian parliament to tell the members of parliament what had really happened in New York. He used his time in parliament to make a pretty special statement, which has been translated into English by me to the best of my abilities: “I want to use this non-event to point to a dangerous fact of the society we live in today. We are living in a time-era where everybody can post anything he or she wants on a blog, without taking any responsability. This is even worse than gossip.” He then pleaded to the other members of parliament: “Together with you, collegues, I must admit that it is almost impossible to defend ourselves against this. Dear collegues, dear collegues of the parliament, collegues of the government, we are all potential victims. I urge you to think about this.”

I don’t want to talk about the fact that this minister has been drunk in New York. I got drunk in New York once as well. After all, it’s a wonderful city with lots of opportunities to get drunk. But I used MY money to fly to New York, and I paid ALL my expenses myself, with MY money. While I am sure that Crembo - he got that nickname because he’s sending Belgian soldiers to the war which can’t be won in Afghanistan - is making much more money than I am, he uses tax-money to fly all around the world with his collaborators.

I can tell you Mr. Minister, don’t bother to have someone of your department call my boss. I am the boss over here, and I have the right to say or write whatever I want. This phenomenon is commenly known as Freedom of Speech.

It is a real shame that so-called leaders of a country do need to shoot the messenger to cover up their own mistakes.

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