Gyurscany’s Conscience Should Count for Something

As a joke, he once called the Saudi Arabian soccer team "terrorists," something Arab states found not so funny. And as a jab at an older politician he was replacing, he said "every man whose wife grows old has earned a younger woman," something women found not so funny.

And last month an audio tape surfaced that was not a jab and not a joke, but an admission of lies, lies, lies about the economy, something the people of Hungary found not funny at all.

Hungary's hip Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurscany has never been in hotter water, but he has never exactly been out of it, either. And that has as much to do with his character -- which can be egotistical, arrogant and feckless -- as it does with Hungary's troubled Communist past, which is woven tightly and inextricably into the untidy democracy that has emerged today.