On the occasion of his 100th day in office earlier this month, still with no functional Cabinet, Yahoo News placed his picture under the category Offbeat Photos. The caption: "Czech Premier Mirek Topolanek, seen here in October 2006, marked 100 days of trying unsuccessfully to form a government in a bid to end a six-month political stalemate, as economists' warnings mixed with public derision."

A tad harsh, no? Look, does the guy really deserve noticeably more public derision than any other recent Czech political leader? After all, his predecessor, Jiří Paroubek, refused to step down for weeks after losing the June elections and Paroubek's predecessor, Stanislav Gross, was drummed out of office in a corruption scandal after he couldn't explain how he paid for his apartment.

Certainly among Czechs, at least, Topolánek is hardly a total write-off. And Yahoo even deprives the poor man of the diacritical on his third vowel. Ouch.

Alongside Pan Premier (a term more usually translated as prime minister) Topolánek on the Web page was an image of a pair of pants that gave a Japanese woman a nasty surprise when she "found her jeans sharper than they first looked" as a hidden scorpion stung her while trying them on.

Also sharing the page with Topolánek, who, frankly, does not make it onto Yahoo News very often, was a holiday stall of hanging Santa hats in London's Oxford Street, illustrating the point that less than half of the children in the United Kingdom aged 7-11 now realize that Christmas is traditionally a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Now come on! Let's give his excellency, Topolánek, who is also fearless leader of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) — at least at press time — a break. Does he really rate being included on such a list of wacky items intended to induce chuckles in North Americans?

Clearly Topolánek knows both what Christmas is about and that you should shake out a pair of jeans, especially if you're shopping where scorpions might be present, before pulling them on.

But it seems our illustrious leader just can't get a break.

An online article that came out at the same time, by the esteemed Agence France Press, bore the headline "The butt of jokes, Czech Premier marks 100-day search for government."

Really now. It isn't like he's lost the government. He knows right where it is. It's just that the Parliament won't go for any of his Cabinet appointments.

And everyone knows that's just because Parliament is split 100-100 between those favoring Topolánek's ODS and those on the side of the Social Democrats, led by Paroubek, whom voters booted out of the prime minister's office in June.

Meanwhile, the International Herald Tribune (IHT) recently branded the Czech Republic as a country that "is suddenly finding democracy something of a puzzle."

Again, completely unfair — and indicative of just how disconnected with the real functioning of this new republic on the rise an august old newspaper like the IHT can be. All they had to do to get the real story was ask a plugged-in political observer on the ground in Prague.

Then they would have seen that the Czech political deadlock, which truly doesn't trouble or surprise most locals, is actually more of a train wreck than a puzzle.