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My President Went to Bratislava and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
As Bush and Putin meet in Bratislava on Thursday, entrepreneurs are out in force on the capital's streets hawking summit souvenirs. With the world media's attention briefly focused on the Slovak capital, city officials are doing all they can to market it as an international hub -- they've even made special postal stamps. Bush, meanwhile, doesn't know when to take the gloves off.Of course protocol folks from Texas don't know anything about customs outside Crawford so once again dubya had help when he made a fool of himself.
In Central Europe, when they say politicians have to press flesh, they mean it very literally. Custom dictates that you always greet someone with an un-gloved hand, no matter the weather. When US President George W. Bush didn't remove his warm leather gloves while meeting Slovak diplomats upon his arrival in Bratislava on Wednesday night, he created quite a public stir. The protocol malfunction -- while offensive to those who were proffered the leather encased hand -- may not have been nearly as big a deal if it weren't for the fact that the reception was being broadcast live on national television. It's understandable that in temperatures only just above freezing that the president and his wife would want to keep their fingers warm (Laura remained be-gloved, too), but some protocol officer should have warned them in advance. "I don't know whether this is usual in the United States, but it is not in our countries. They may have not been informed about Central European habits," Deana Lutherova, a Slovak protocol expert, told the Czech news agency CTK. Still, on the grand scale of diplomatic faux pas, this hardly rates alongside, say, vomiting on a prime minister and then falling over. Bush Jr. continues to do his daddy proud. (12:09 p.m. CET)
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