A Polack and an African-American socialist president walk into a bar. . .

Poland has been forced to deny its foreign minister 'joked' that President-Elect Barack Obama's grandparents were cannibals.

In an episode that could potentially strain relations between Warsaw and Washington, Radek Sikorski, an Oxford-educated politician who has lived in the US, was reported to have made the jibe by an opposition politician, Ryszard Czarnecki.

Writing in his blog, Mr Czarnecki, an MEP, quoted the foreign minister as saying: "Have you heard that Obama may have a Polish connection? His grandfather ate a Polish missionary."

A spokesman for the Polish foreign office conceded that Mr Sikorski had made the controversial comment, but denied that the foreign minister had intended to insult Mr Obama, whose father was Kenyan.

Here's the thing. While Western Europe, also known as Old Europe or Dying Europe, is out dancing in the streets over America's election of B. Hussein Obama to the presidency Eastern Europe, also known as New Europe or Recently Free Europe and formerly known as the Warsaw Pact, is worried and frightened.

You see people in nations like Poland know politicians like the little messiah well. They watched America from behind the Iron Curtain as one weak liberal politician after another enabled the Soviet Union until, finally, a leader with a spine stepped up and toppled the Soviet Union and broke the chains of slavery which had bound Eastern Europe.

And, not incidentally, as a nation that was squeezed between Nazi Germany and the USSR the Poles have learned to be wary of creepy personality cults as well.

There is little to endear Obama to those who have recently lived under the kind of totalitarian government that he and his party have historically sought to appease so we shouldn't be surprised to find that he is the butt of their jokes.

Get used to it. By the time he's finished with America he's going to be the butt of a lot of our jokes as well.