It didn't make sense to me, but I assumed there was something cultural about the potato which may have greater resonance than I could see.

keep to the Fen Causeway

They asked for an apology from the centrist government for something a leftist paper wrote. Nationalism, autocratic instincts and narcissism combined.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

BTW, here is the original satire. It is said Polish media made very crude translations. I don't understand the potato reference, it could be a reference to a scene in the film the brothers starred in as children.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Paper's Potato Prod Pisses Polish President-Premier Pair

If you call someone a pomme de terre in French, that will only elicit a puzzled frown. But if you use the more colloquial term patate (ultimately drived, like "potato", from batata, a Carib name for the sweet potato), you'll be suggesting the other is a bit of an idiot, a dummy, perhaps clumsy.

Quelle patate!

But I suppose Tageszeitung said kartoffel...

An utterly idiotic affair, but nothing to do with trying to distract from the appointment of Jaroslaw by Lech, though Marcinkiewicz's lukewarm endorsement of the twins' outrage may have been a minor contributing factor to his ouster.

What's characteristic of their mentality  is the reaction to an open letter written by every single ex-foreign minister which complained that the little temper tantrum was only hurting Poland's interests. They were denounced as being anti-Polish. The president responded, but only to one of them - Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former anti-Nazi resistance hero, the rest he declared weren't worthy of even a response.  

The governing parties see themselves as the targets of a campaign by Western liberals (in both the European 'neo-liberal' and American 'progressive' sense) who, working with allies in the Polish press and opposition are seeking to discredit them as a way of turning Poland into a colony of Brussels-Germany and destroy traditional Polish values and religion.  They're also utterly paranoid about Germany and do indeed have little knowledge of foreign countries.

The irony is that the taz article is nothing compared to the level of attacks that the Kaczynski brothers and their press supporters leveled at Lech's predecessor, the post-communist Aleksander Kwasniewski.  When you view yourselves as the only people standing up for Poland's interests, as the god anointed saviours of Poland, and your opponents as traitors, this is what you get.  

But this is really just a ridiculous farce. What's more worrying is the stuff going on in Poland itself. For example today's GW has a story about a state radio talk show host being summarily fired because he mentioned that many of the LPR's activists are fascists. That's  as undisputable as the fact that most of the SLD, the party in power in the previous government, had been apparatchiks in the former communist dictatorship. Or the firing of the person in charge of monitoring foreign press coverage in the foreign ministry - he'd put the taz article in his daily posting of translations of articles on Poland in the European press. Then there's the recent firing of the guy in charge of EU relations in the education ministry - he'd distributed an official EU pamphlet on tolerance and democratic values for schools. Or the continued presence of a neo-Nazi as deputy head of the state TV. Or being even more into party-line appointments in the  civil service and state owned companies than the previous government.