Obama & Clinton continue to rebuild US image abroad…
March 6th, 2009 — dan
Lets recap some of the Obama administration’s current track record:
- Obama gives the British PM a 25 DVD box set during his inaugural visit to the UK
- Clinton visits the EU and mispronounced several names and claimed American democracy’s been “around a lot longer than European democracy.”
So now Clinton is off to Russia where she gives their Foreign Minister a mock ‘reset’ button as a metaphor to her intent to rebuild US-Russia relations. The thing is that she used a button that looks more like the button you would use to launch each country’s respective nuclear arsenal AND they botched the Russian translation of ‘reset’ to read ‘overcharged’ in Russian (in the Greek alphabet vs. Cyrillic to compound the error).
This article comment by dean637 hits the nail on the head - probably because he is an Engineer :^)
In the electrical and electronics industry, this type of red button is not used for reset, but instead for emergency stop. A reset button is spring-loaded so it will restore power immediately when released. This type, once activated, shuts down everything and requires the user to turn it and pull it out by hand (note the arrows on the button). This display of mechanical and industrial ignorance is what you get from a White House full of Washington lawyers with zero experience in resetting anything. Add to this the use of the Roman alphabet instead of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and then the clueless selection of the wrong Russian word! Soviet specialist Condi Rice, the previous U.S. Secretary of State, must have choked on her lunch when she saw this. Astounding ignorance, exceeded only by gaping moral blindness. This is truly amateur hour, but gambling with nuclear annihilation. Get ready for confrontation with the Russians in Cuban Missile Crisis round 2.
