Turkmenistan

From Rachel Maddow at MSNBC:

Turkmenistan shares a final syllable with so many of its neighbors, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan.

But frankly, it makes it easy from this distance to sometimes confuse Turkmenistan with some of the other very lovely stans.

To do so, I'm telling you honestly, would be a mistake because Turkmenistan has national politics unto itself.

Turkmenistan's leaders have a real flair for the grandiose. The first president to serve the newly independent nation was Saparmurat Niyazov.

He came to power in 1991. He erected a golden statue of himself in the capital that rotates 360 degrees every 24 hours so as to always follow the sun.

He renamed the days of the week and the months of the year after himself and his family members.

And when he had to give up smoking, so did every single government minister in the entire country.

Not to be outdone, Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, not only has a more difficult to pronounce name, he also refuses to be outshone by his predecessor in the art of stage craft.

At the opening of a new cancer hospital in Turkmenistan, the president eschewed the whole cutting a ribbon at the new facility thing. That would be what they do in normal countries.

Instead, he decided to personally cut the first patient.

Mr. Berdimuhamedow, who is a trained dentist, literally, personally, performed the hospital's first surgery.

He removed a benign tumor from behind some poor patient's ear. Now, that is government-run health care.