Talk about the AWK-WARD

Bush is in Hungary today, where he's going to talk about the 1956 uprising ...

For most people, I'd think that would be a very definite case of the awk-ward, given how the uprising pretty much happened because the West and especially the US gave the Hungarians to understand that we'd back their attempt to become neutral in Cold War Europe, and then, well, didn't.

I wasn't very old then, and don't first-hand remember it, but I grew up knowing that we'd betrayed Imre Nagy (I even grew up knowing how to pronounce his name, EEM-ray Nodj, so that it jars me when I hear that surname said as "NAG-y"). Hungarians in the streets, Soviet tanks rolling in and crushing them ... the whole legacy of the Warsaw Pact beginning, pretty much, with that bloody October.

But though W is older than I am, I doubt he'll feel that special sense of shame when he speaks today. I mean, this is a man who can't even say "shame on me" - he's not going to feel it for something that he wasn't nimself personally involved in.

But then again, this trip (what Tony Snow calls "kind of a tone poem about the 1956 revolution") isn't coinciding with the real 50th anniversary - Bush is months early. He was supposed to be going to Ukraine, but since the Orange parties have been having a hard time putting a coalition together, the decision was made for Bush to go the Hungary (a symbol of what's gone right in post-Soviet space) instead.

"This is mainly about visiting the Hungarian government and paying homage to what they went through 50 years ago," Snow says. Bush is, according to the BBC, expected "to acknowledge the high cost Hungary paid in its struggle for independence". He isn't expected to mention that some of that cost is due to the failure of the US to live up to its rhetoric in that long-ago October. (I know. Quel surprise.)

And maybe he'll be lucky enought that the Hungarian people won't be bringing that up... even though this is yet another country where he'll have no choice but to see demonstrators against his policies. But he'll be home again tonight, so I doubt it'll make much of an impression.

I mean, not much does, does it?