What you mean that the cracka from Ang-land don't like my DVDs?
Posted on 03/10/2009 5:37:45 AM PDT by Tolik
While President Barack Obama tries to improve U.S. relations with rogue states like Syria and Iran, he might want to ensure ties with our closest ally aren’t strained in the meantime. Damascus and Tehran will remain hostile as long as they’re ruled by Bashar Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, but Britain has long been a reliable friend no matter who is in charge. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair forged a strong personal friendship despite their ideological differences, yet President Obama is off to an embarrassing start with his Downing Street counterpart.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown felt half snubbed on his visit to the U.S. a few days ago when he didn’t receive the customary press conference and dinner. According to London’s Daily Telegraph, the Obama administration says the president was too tired.
Presidents and prime ministers from all countries are exhausted most of the time. An excuse like that wouldn’t wash if President Manny Mori of Micronesia were blown off. I doubt very much that Prime Minister Brown was slighted on purpose, but an unnamed State Department official quoted in the Telegraph wants the British to believe the cool welcome is all they should have expected.
“There’s nothing special about Britain,” he reportedly said. “You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
The same as Somalia, Turkmenistan, and North Korea? Good grief. Great Britain is the mother country of the United States of America. School children know it. At least they knew it when I was a child. The “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K. is so well-established it shouldn’t even have to be mentioned. It’s not a Bush administration policy that’s up for review. It has existed longer than Barack Obama has been alive.
Rudeness, unfortunately, isn’t the end of it.
Mr Brown handed over carefully selected gifts, including a pen holder made from the wood of a warship that helped stamp out the slave trade - a sister ship of the vessel from which timbers were taken to build Mr Obama’s Oval Office desk. Mr Obama’s gift in return, a collection of Hollywood film DVDs that could have been bought from any high street store, looked like the kind of thing the White House might hand out to the visiting head of a minor African state.
Somebody needs to be fired. Even the head of Burundi deserves something nicer than what he could get for a dollar at a bootleg store in the market. It hasn’t been that long since Democratic Party support staff assisted the White House when foreign heads of state came to visit. Plenty of people in Washington know how this works. Surely Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knows a few of her husband’s former staffers who can find a replacement.
Barack Obama campaigned as the worldly and sophisticated diplomacy candidate after President George W. Bush was castigated for “alienating” our allies. I wasn’t happy about strained ties between the U.S., France, and Germany during the Bush administration’s first term, but those relationships were repaired when the congenitally anti-American French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder were replaced by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. Chirac and Schroeder weren’t just opposed to American policies, which of course was their right. They campaigned on anti-American platforms. (Imagine an American candidate for president bashing the French on the stump.) President Bush had his work cut out for him with those two, and it said something about who was mostly at fault when voters in France and Germany corrected the problem before he left office.
I’m sure President Obama is tired. How could he not be? The job is exhausting. Just look at the “before” and “after” photos of recent American presidents. There’s no fault or foul there, but we shouldn’t hear about it. We shouldn’t read about it, especially not during the first 100 days. This diplomatic faux pas reflects badly on all of us, and it’s a bit disconcerting. If President Obama is too tired to properly meet with the British prime minister during a time of relative peace, what should we expect if he meets with, say, the Russian president during war time?
You are welcome.
2 amazing things happened: Hillary and her staffers did not bother to check with any native language speaker. What America has no shortage of is native speakers of any language, and its hundreds of thousands of Russian speakers in the Boston-DC corridor. Some things just do not translate well. RESET has a wealth of meanings that Russian language - otherwise rich and powerful - simply does not provide in this case.
Second. Media accepted Lavrov’s translation without a fact check, right-wing talk radio including.
All the word-play on overcharge in financial sense was factually wrong.
Hilariously, I have to defend Hillary’s spin of an “overworked” staffer’s mistake as being more true to the “overload”.
“overload”
1st I’ve heard of the overload translation. If that is the case, it sounds like more of a Freudian slip to me then..
Don’t the Alinski - Cloward/Pliven groupies want to overload our system into failure?
See my post #21. I was amazed that Lavrov’s words were not checked. What, he can’t be wrong? Talk radio fell for it as well.
If we are exploring analogies, I think it can be an “eject” button to hit when we overloaded and start to disintegrate. Where would we land?
I don’t think Britain wanted “special treatment”. I think we we wanted to be treated with a bit of respect.
Is this how Obama would treat his enemies?
Maybe, as it is in America it is a de-emphasis on “Proper English” and replaced by a slang term or street language.
Like overloading or overcharging a credit card. Not precise but it gets the point across.
But whether it was overload” or“overcharge”.it definitely wasn't "reset"
Not what one would want representing an country, much less an super power.
It really is Barry Sotero’s Amateur Hour at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He is incompetent, inept, clumsy and in over his head. All that said I wouldn’t be surprised if our afro-centric muslim in chief sisn’t deliberately snub Brown to prove to his eastern allies that it really is a new day in American - Terror sponsoring state relations.
...”the Obama administration says the president was too tired.”
Yah right, dude... Is the Obama regime referring to the Obama who tirelessly campaigned for months without respite?
Such a lie.
That’s a progressive socialist diplomat.
What you mean that the cracka from Ang-land don't like my DVDs?
British Embassy
3100 Massachusettes Ave NW
Washington DC 20008
I aint covering for the asshat
When friendship really matters, you show it!
Maybe Gordon Brown would have been better served if he would have brought Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Pakastani and Labour member of the House of Lords with him also.
http://www.thedailychange.com/obama-putz-3/
And you deserve to be treated with respect.
Britain has stood by America through thick and thin. The ties between us are ancient, sacred...more so than any short-sighted, dimwit American politician can imagine.
I hope it was not intentional, because I fail to see any good served by it. Stupidity and unprofessionalism are bad enough.
Just wait until he has a meeting with Queen Elizabeth and gives her a DVD's of Mandingo and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.
Hillary won’t be able to spell “reset”
I'm afraid to say this fatigue issue would not be an issue but for the shock of the rigors of the job. How can this be?
Not saying this just to throw dirt at the President, but all accounts indicate it is true: he has never had to work hard in his life - except perhaps at Harvard. Whether it was the status, a salve for his own insecurity, the fancy house, airplane, and perks, or the mistaken notion he would be a ruler rather than a president of a free constitutional republic -- he clearly underestimated the job.
Close, but no cigar.
:D
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.