The anti-anti-Semitism rhetoric is getting old and should be just ignored. People should vote according to their own views and not threats. It's pretty obvious.
DariuszTelka: But on the topic...one shouldn't dismiss the wives that fast. Remember, they have their husbands ear, and heart. If you look at history, many a ruler has made his decisions after bedroom talk with his wife.
Sure, only that the President of Poland is not a ruler. He doesn't make decisions other than who should get a national award, when to meet our sports teams, and what to tell people for Christmas. In politics - he can veto the government's proposals, the Senate can outvote his veto, and there his power ends. It's more of a nuisance than any power.
In short, the President of Poland has nothing in common with the President of the US, other than the title. He's told by the government what he can or cannot do, where he should go and what he should say, and if he doesn’t comply he’s accused of betraying the national interest of the country, as we’ve seen it done in Kaczyński’s case. Poland never had a model of a strong ruler, and it's unlikely there ever will be one. We're the country of puppet kings and puppet presidents. Pacta Conventa and Henrician articles anyone?
The President of Poland is more like our media image. It's the postcard from Poland that the world gets from us. They see us the way they see our president. So let's look what postcards we have sent so far:
- Lech Wałęsa, a stubborn electrician, without any knowledge of English, and, for those who know Polish, speaking an appalling broken Polish
- Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who lied about his master degree, who got drunk during the celebration of our soldiers in Katyń, and who mocked the pope
- Lech Kaczyński, with a doctorate (that's an improvement!) and a twin-brother ruling him against the government (it appears brothers are worse than wives), a homophobe, and a paranoid diplomat (that's itself a contradiction, isn’t it?)
Is it how we want people to see Poland? Because those are the postcards we send, and it shouldn’t surprise us that people often assume things about us upon such images.
So far, at best, we could hope that our Presidents wouldn’t make us an international laughing stock. There’s a sense of relief every time they come back from a foreign trip and there’s no affair accompanying their visit! Otherwise, they all, from right to left, make us cringe.
Wouldn’t it be great, for a change, to have a president who would be able to make a positive impact? Surely Sikorski, an Oxford graduate, and a good diplomat with a very good knowledge of our foreign politics, and his wife, an American (a Polish resident for some decades though) Pulitzer prize winner, would be a nice picture of Poland.
Sikorski shouldn't be an enigma to anyone. Our present position on the international scene is his achievement. And I'd say the West has viewed us with a kinder eye for the last two years. As to what kind of voice we could expect from Anne Applebaum, here’s her article to the Washington Post written after Obama had cancelled the missile defense program: Letting Europe Drift
Personally, I think that we should just elect the last Czartoryski a king. He'd be an arts patron et al. But as long as we have presidents, let's at least hold them up to some intellectual, diplomatic and cultural level.
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