My second post is about a funny member of our Belgian goverment, the Secretary of Defense: André Flahaut. He is the man who governs the belgian army. Well, army might be a big word, we only have like a couple of thousand soldiers. And the thing they're probably best at, is drinking. But I'll leave the funny army anecdotes for a later post.
Now there notorious leader, André Flahaut. Born in 1955 in some village in Belgium. And, so he writes on the army website: "As a child I played a lot with my 2 brothers."
Except looking like a drunk, and as a Belgian military man, probably being one, he's done a lot of good for our country...
For Flemish people, in the north, he's the tipical politician from the South: lazy, clumsy and especially stupid. A couple of examples...
One of his colleagues, also from the south of the country, once called him a mule. And this because of the blunders he committed during his reign.
In 2004, he visited the victims of the tsunami in Sri Lanka. Visiting a little village terribly hit by the disaster, André wanted to leave immediately... He was hungry... A man has to prioritise, doesn't he?
Another famous story was the time he sent highly trained doctors of a military hospital specialised in burning wounds to Russia, to treat some extremely rich billionair over there. When someone asked him what the hell was going on, he answered the belgian army would do that for everyone...
Even people from in his own party call him arrogant and rude. "He doesn't have respect for the parliament, he's always late, and acts like a peasant..."
The best story of them all, was that André took a military helicopter, an Agusta (italian helicopters, who have a really famous scandal surrounding them... Will come in a later post), to go see a movie... He took the chopper, to avoid traffic, and be there faster... One funny detail, the movie was 'An Unconvenient Truth', by Al Gore, the documentary about Global Warming. When people commented on his helicopter flight, he commented: "That helicopter only uses 12 times the gasoline a car would use, and besides, the army is only responsible for 1% of the total Belgian pollution..."
You gotta love the man, always a funny response...
A shame we won't see much of him anymore, several polticians declared they will do everything to keep him out of a future government... A shame for my Blog, but maybe a good thing for Belgium...
His website: http://www.flahaut.be/
André Flahaut, with on his right, the prince of Belgium (who's gonna appear in some other posts)
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