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Too make a long story short, a bunch of Polish spies (or Military Counter Intelligence agents) on duty in Afghanistan put photographs of themselves with their full names on a popular website here called “nasza-klasa” (our class). It’s a school reunion site where old boys, schoolmates, Taliban fighters and so on meet up to see how their old buddies have aged, got fat, got married, tried to occupy one’s country and so forth.

Prompted by this, I decided to devote this one to absurdities of Polish life. Like for instance, the requirement that in order to sit a driving test you must have done a course in a driving school. If you fail you have to do a supplemental course in a driving school. Guess where the examiners are recruited from? Well from the driving schools, of course. What matters is not that you can drive but that your driving school papers are in order.

Here’s a direct quote from Jarosław Kaczyński of PiS: “I am against a referendum because it would certainly produce unambiguous [jednoznaczne] results… I think that referendums should be held in those countries where public opinion is against [the Lisbon Constitution]. The people should not be cheated. The decent thing would be to have referendums in England [sic], France and Holland.” (Nasz Dziennik, March 12th, reprinted in Nie). On second thoughts, I’m not sure that is so absurd. He’s only saying what all the Eurocrats think: no referendums because people might vote for the “wrong” thing. When Ireland rejected the Nice referendum, the exercise was simply repeated until the people voted yes.

Nie also tells of the following happy situation in the administration of public health service in Poland: the NFZ (roughly equivalent to the UK’s NHS) draws up reports on abuses in the health services (overcharging the state in various ways) but the organ that is empowered to do anything about the abuses doesn’t get the reports because the NFZ is not obliged to hand them over, which it doesn’t want to do because if it did it (i.e. the NFZ) would get less money from the state to provide health services. Clear? Of course not.

I commented before on Konrad Niklewicz’s bizarre ideas about who should sponsor the debate on GMOs – i.e. the companies that stand to earn most from their introduction, not scientists, the state or, God help us all, opponents. And here a week or two later is the same Niklewicz writing about how lobbyists rule in Brussels. One example is the “Competitivness [sic] in Biotechnology Advisory Group,” of which the dismayed Niklewicz writes: “It does not have a single non-governmental organization representative; it has six scientists and twenty business representatives” (Gazeta Wyborcza March 28th). This article is shoved back to page 30, the business section, unlike the same author’s clarion call for business to lead the debate on GMO, which was on page 2.

Another curiosity of Polish law: it is possible to libel the dead. Roman Giertych has to publish an apology to the family of Jacek Kuroń for remarks he made in 2006. (Kuroń died in 2004.) I’d take Kuroń’s side against Giertych any time, living or dead, but in my innocence I really did think that dead people had no say in the matter.

When Minister for Justice Ziobro left office he had to return some of the gimcracks our rulers are given to help them oppress us. Specifically, something like three mobile phones and a laptop computer. Ziobro, a man of impeccable morals, obviously had nothing to hide and the damage evident in the returned laptop was purely from wear and tear. He was a hard man, Ziobro. The laptop is on the road to recovery of data now, though. The unencrypted data shows that he was writing the scripts for the State TV news service. On second thoughts, I’ll put that in the passive voice: scripts for the State TV news service were written on his laptop. The encrypted stuff will be denuded and demasked in the next week or two.

It’s no wonder the present government is doing nothing.

In yesterday’s entry I forgot to mention the huff that president Kaczyński disappeared into after Tusk’s victory. Apparently, before the wheels of government could be set again in motion, Tusk – like it or not, the people’s choice – had to apologise to the president for all the nasty things he said. Like for instance, referring to “the Kaczyński brothers.” But they are brothers… Yesterday was the first day of the new parliament and it too was marked by PiS’s petty spitefulness. Ziobro suggested that the proposed marshal of the Sejm had “questions to answer.” What those questions were, alas, we do not know, since no one in his party had the guts to ask them. The important thing was to smear the new guy and get a whispering campaign going good and early against him.

But all of that is behind us now as golden age of PO-PSL politics, flawless and incorrupt, with the interests only of the nation at heart, opens up before us. Since the subject of politics is therefore closed for the next four years or so I turn to Nabokov, a worthy adversary, but in this case an ally. He believes that before generalisation must come attention to detail.

No, not really. He is bitter to the end. He is claiming that a judge’s decision to force a couple of PiS-sympathetic journalists to appear in court in a libel case is evidence that the new rulers of Poland are in cahoots with the judiciary to do down PiS. I know, I know it doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile the soon-to-be-ex-minister for defence appears to believe that bad news from Iraq should be censored: he took Gazeta Wyborcza to task for reporting the death of a Polish soldier there before the man’s family had been informed. The newspaper did not release the man’s name, in case you were wondering. They merely reported what had happened. The same soon-to-be-ex-minister for defence is putting it about that the soon-to-be-future-minister for defence, Radosław Sikorski, is a traitor. Kaczyński claims Sikorski is anti-American - apparently because he had the cheek to actually try to negotiate favourable terms about the missile defence system that America - sorry, Poland, wants to build here. Remember: it was Kaczyński that made Sikorski minister for defence in the not too distant past.

And among Ziobro’s last acts was the appointment of his secret police henchman to a nice feathered nest in the state prosecution service.

The people of Poland woke up this morning slightly dazed, slightly confused, by the million-strong army of industrious party activists who were busily engaged in removing and ecologically disposing of the election campaign posters that had appeared over the last six weeks of intense but cheerful campaigning.

Battered but proud, ex-prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński spoke to the reporters assembled at PiS headquarters as he struggled into his high-visibility overalls: “We didn’t make it but the important thing is - as a tough opposition party - to clean up this mess which the democratic process necessarily entails. I congratulate Donald Tusk and look forward to meeting him today on the [main Warsaw road] Trasa Łazienka as we take down our pictures.” He quipped: “Donaldek will be working up the right hand side of the street while I will be on the left.” His brother, Lech Kaczyński, president of Poland, will not be joining in the clean-up effort as the constitution forbids the president from interfereing in the democcratic process of elections.

There was jubiliation in the PO HQ. Donald Tusk, heavy-duty wire-snippers in hand, was carried shoulder high to the first lamp post on the left as you walk out of the building and triumphantly cut loose a large paste-board image of himself. To a chanting, clapping crowd he turned and said: “So that life will be better. For Everyone.” Taking their cue from the probable next-prime minister of Poland, some two hundred activists, young and old, flooded down the street, tearing tatty cardboard and paper election posters from the crash barriers on the central median. This was no time for narrow party-political interests. PiS, LiD and PSL posters were also removed by the enthusiastic volunteers as a team of professional outdoor advertising specialists took down a giant poster of losers Zyta Gilowska, Zbigniew Ziobro, Zbigniew Religa and Jarosław Kaczyński from an enormous billboard, replacing them with a picture of a bag of crisps.

Ziobro himself, although his right arm is in a cast, was on hand. “The injured hand didn’t prevent me from posing for the cameras as I cast my vote,” he said. “So why would it prevent me from doing this civic duty either?”

The best thing by far on Polish TV right now - better even than the not-bad-for-Poland Szymon Majewski Show - is PiS’s childishly crude and hilariously inept party political broadcast. The theme is corruption, of course, the only tune PiS knows, and it contrasts two Polands - that of “not long ago” and the Poland of today. In the first half we see a bunch of fat cats (villas, swanky cars, improbably fat and smoky cigars) exchanging briefcases full of cash for contracts: one of them says to the other “now all we have to do is bribe the opposition.” In the second we see panic, fear and the same fat cats swearing (it’s bleeped) into their mobile phones “[minister for justice] Ziobro’s not on the take!”

Have you spotted the flaw? Who the hell bribes the opposition? It’s the ruling party that counts. Also, who were the opposition in the Poland of “not long ago” portrayed in the ad? Why, the Kaczyńskites, that’s who.

Yesterday I had a perfectly average day — the details of which I will not bother you with — nicely rounded off with a refreshing ten hours kip. Is this “dignity under pressure”? Am I keeping my head while others all around are losing theirs?

I ask because the signs in Polish are particularly — no, I mean particularly — grim right now. Michnik writes in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza of a “creeping coup” and, reason though he has to dislike the ruling party, he does not sound in the least hysterical. Briefly, Janusz Kaczmarek was arrested. Until August 8th Kaczmarek was the Minister for the Interior and Administration. Before that, he was the “national attorney” (a peculiarity of Poland’s constitution is that the state attorney is also the Minister for Justice - that’s being your own boss).

Kaczmarek has started telling tales about the politicisation and abuse of the secret services, the procurator’s office and the police under the current regime. He has been charged with attempting to obstruct the investigation into the leaking of operational details concerning an unsuccessful attempt by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) to entrap Andrzej Lepper (former coalition partner).

Another person who had to be shut up was one Konrad Kornatowski, a former police chief, who - entirely coincidentally - had been due to testify before a parliamentary commission into all the skulduggery and shenanigans of the regime. So he was arrested. So was Jaromir Netzel, boss of PZU, one of the biggest insurers in Europe. They’re also out to get businessman Ryszard Krauze but he is fortunate enough to be abroad - possibly in a democracy, I can’t confirm that yet - at the moment.

Meanwhile Primesident Kaczyński appears on television and pretends not to be aware of the details of these perfectly routine police investigations. Ziobro, the boy wonder Minister for Justice, seems to be keeping a low profile, perhaps because he has hopelessly compromised himself time and time again.

On the plus side, the bus timetables in the provincial town where I am holidaying at the moment no longer define summer as lasting till the end of January.