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March 6, 2009
My former (praise Jesus!) Senator at work.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened her first extended talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov by giving him a present meant to symbolize the Obama administration's vow to "press the reset button" on U.S.-Russia relations.She handed a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift: a red button on a black base with a Russian word
peregruzka printed on top. [my emphasis]"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" Clinton asked.
"You got it wrong," Lavrov said.
Sounds like she went to Staples and relabeled a gift.
Hope! Change! Imaginative but cheap people in the White House who want to try symbolism before substance - and get their symbol wrong. Having spent years telling us the Bush administration was incompetent this makes a difficult narrative for the surviving legacy media to relate. Me, I'm amused. Doesn't Hillary! have someone to consult about these gift exchanges involving exotic languages? Or should, perhaps, we wonder about the State Department in general?
I'm certain there are folks in Washington busily denying that the native speaker knows what he's talking about and that their relabeling of an EASY button as RESTART was correct.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at March 6, 2009 11:54 PM