Posted on 03/08/2009 6:22:48 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
On top of the major faux pas in gifting promulgated by the Obamas during the visit of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown comes the story of the ridiculous mistake that Secretary of State Hillary "the linguist" Clinton made with her gift to Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
The "gift" was supposed to be a funny one, but it was a misfire because it seems that Clinton couldn't find anyone in the employ of the State Department that had a grasp of the Russian language. The U.S. media has not made too big a deal about this one but the Russian and British media has been playing this one to the hilt. It's being called the "Button Gaffe" and it certainly is making our Sec. of State look stupid to the world.
At their meeting in Geneva last week, Clinton gave Lavrov what was supposed to be a "re-set button" telling the Russian people that we were "re-setting" our relationship. Unfortunately for our expert at foreign relations, the word on the button's casing did not say "re-set" in Russian. It said "overcharged" or "overload." So, if the Russian Minister were to push that button we'd be "overloading" our relations. NOT the message that we wanted to send, was it?
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
>Since they were looking for the word “reset”, why didn’t they just look at any Russian computer for the reset button and copy the word.
That requires intelligent thought, something that I doubt has seen DC in a long time.
Must have been an overload. They are back now.
The State Department couldn’t get the Cyrillic right on the button either...
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