“Come on, Larry. Just once! Let’s just see if she’ll notice. I swear I won’t do anything with her.” How many twins have uttered something like that to their identical sibling, trying to convince the sibling to let him go on a date with his brother’s girlfriend?
What if the twins both held public office, only one was much higher in rank? Say Jeb and W were twins — wouldn’t you think that Jeb would try, just once, to convince his brother to let him make some kind of address as the president? “Come on, Georgie! We ain’t talkin’ about a State of the Union address. It’s just a little chat out in the Rose Garden. They’ll never notice!”
We’re fortunate that Jeb and W aren’t twins, because they seem just, well, lacking-in-seriousness enough to try it.
Such a situation is not inconceivable in the near future in Poland, though. Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz has resigned and the ruling party, PiS (Law and -Order- Justice — Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), has indicated that they want Jarosław Kaczynski to take the position.
“Kaczynski. That sounds familiar,” some might think.
That’s because the president of Poland is Lech Kaczynski, Jarosław’s twin brother.
Oh, he’s so adorable, let’s just call him “Jarek.”
It’s not clear whether Jarek is going to take the position. He turned it down earlier on the reasonable grounds that it might give some people the willies to have twin brothers in the two highest positions in the nation, but I think this time he’ll just suffer through those discomforting thoughts and take the post.
But it’s no big change. Jarek’s been running the country for month’s. Marcinkiewicz’s just been a puppet, people say.
That sounds awfully familiar.
At any rate, the BBC report seems strangely enough to confirm this:
Over recent weeks, there had been frequent reports of a rift between Mr Marcinkiewicz and Jaroslaw Kaczynski over economic policy.
BBC did not use the Polish character “ł,” pronounced like the English “w,” so it’s not a typo.
Wait a minute? I know Jarek is the PiS party leader, but his brother is president, is he not? Wouldn’t it be tensions between the president and the PM that would cause the PM to resign, rather than tensions between the party boss and the PM? Unless, of course, the party boss is the boss.
The good thing in all this? At least Jarek will admit — sort of — that he’s in charge.