Obama Administration Has Desperate Need for Gift Czar

Wrong red button
By DAVID S. CLOUD | 3/6/09 1:18 PM EST

GENEVA—After promising to “push the reset button” on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks here Friday night to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire for a new beginning in the relationship.

It didn’t quite work out as she planned.

She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift—a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word “peregruzka” printed on top.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise. Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”

Clinton and Lavrov guffawed. “We won’t let you do that to us,” she said.

Despite the shoddy translation work on the U.S. side, Clinton and Lavrov emerged from their meeting a few hours later saying they had accomplished their initial goal—reducing the frostiness in U.S.-Russia relations that had taken hold by the end of the Bush administration.

At a joint press conference afterward Clinton and Lavrov called each other by their first names and said they had conducted wide-ranging discussions on Iran, missile defense, Afghanistan, and nuclear arms reduction. They agreed to intensify preparations for opening a new round of nuclear arms negotiations to replace the one that expires at the end of this year.

They each emphasized that major disagreements and disputes remain on matters such as U.S. support for Georgia, the former Soviet republic invaded by Moscow last year, and on an announced sale by Moscow of advanced air defense missiles to Iran. The improvement in tone was unmistakable compared to the icy encounters that Lavrov used to hold with Clinton’s predecessor.

But in a meeting largely devoid of concrete accomplishments, Clinton’s gift became a source of continuing amusement to everyone except her staff, who realized that flubbing a foreign language hardly made their boss, the nation’s top diplomat, look good.

When a Russian reporter asked her about the mistake, Clinton conceded that Lavrov had “corrected our word choice” and went on to gamely make the best of it. “In a way the word that was on the button turns out also to be true,” she argued Though Lavrov had said that word on the button meant overcharge, Clinton suggested that that peregruzka could also be translated as overload.

“We are resetting so the minister and I have an overload of work,” she said.

But Lavrov refused to let the matter rest there, bringing it up twice more during the press conference in a way that suggested he wasn’t completely unhappy at Clinton’s discomfort.

“We have reached agreement on how reset should sound in both Russian and English,” he announced at one point. “We have no disagreement here.”

A few minutes later, he referred to the gift again, noting that he and Clinton had pressed the button together—a move that summoned up thoughts not of easing tension but of launching a nuclear strike.

“It is a very, very large red button,” he said. “I do hope that Russia and the United States and other countries would never ever push any other buttons associated with initiation of destructive hostilities.”

He told Clinton he would put the button on his desk in Moscow.

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19719.html
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My Thoughts

Is it stupidity, carelessness, or apathy that this administration doesn't seem to put any thought at all toward the gifts that they give foreign leaders? Their gift choices have been beyond horrendous.

First he gives PM Gordon Brown 25 DVD's that he has probably numerous times. Then Hillary gives her Russian counterpart a red button that was supposed to say "reset" but instead says "overcharge". I wonder if it was a Freudian moment. Could "overcharge" symbolize the overcharging of America's credit Obama is using to pay for all of his liberal fantasies.

Hillary said they "worked hard" to find the right word. How hard is it to pick up a Russian to English dictionary? What about the many translator websites that they could have used? I know Obama has a Blackberry, and there is a language translator that he can get and use on his phone for free.

For a campaign that was flawless, it's amazing how much the actual governing looks like the complete opposite.

Iran's Invitation to Afghan Talks Should Get Lost in the Mail

US to invite Iran to Afghan talks

The new US administration has said it will engage with Iran on a diplomatic front [AFP]

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has said Iran will be invited to a proposed international conference on the future of Afghanistan.

Clinton suggested the meeting at a gathering of Nato foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

She said the conference involving "all the stakeholders and interested parties" should take place by the end of the month.

Clinton emphasised that all of Afghanistan's neighbours would be asked to attend the conference.

"If we move forward with such a meeting, it is expected that Iran would be invited as a neighbour of Afghanistan," Clinton told a news conference in Brussels.

US officials said no final decision had been made on a venue for the conference, but Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, told reporters it would probably be held in the Netherlands.

In a sharp turnaround from the previous US administration, Barack Obama, the US president, has said he wants to talk to Iran on a range of issues and the conference invitation would be the start of a diplomatic outreach to Tehran.

Obama has ordered a renewed focus on the war in Afghanistan, and plans to send an additional 17,000 troops to the region in an effort to turn the conflict around.

Policy review

The United States is said to be doing a review of their isolationist policies towards Iran, including whether to open a low-level diplomatic office in Tehran.

However, Washington remains at odds with Tehran primarily over its nuclear programme which Washington says is aimed at building an atomic bomb.

Tehran says its programme is for peaceful power purposes.

"Our task is to dissuade them, deter them and prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon," Clinton said.

She has said Iran's nuclear programme will be among items topping the agenda when she holds talks with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, on Friday in Geneva.

The United States cut off diplomatic ties with Tehran during the 1979-1981 US hostage crisis, in which a group of Iranian students held 52 US diplomats hostage at the American embassy for 444 days.


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http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/03/20093602055818590.html

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My Thoughts

Inviting Iran to the table to discuss the future of Afghanistan is like asking the pyromaniac arsonist to come to a conference discussing the future of the fire department and how to prevent more fires.


I would assume that there would be plans talked about and made about how to fight Al-Qaeda and terrorism. Having the terror-sponsoring countries such as Iran discussing how to prevent terrorists from operating in another country is counterproductive.

The Obama administration has committed themselves to opening diplomatic relations with the hardline Islamic nation. As dangerous opening relations with the militant and borderline psychotic dictator is, starting talks in such a crucial setting that could have serious ramifications for not just the US and Iran but also Afghanistan and the rest of the world is absolutely insane.