Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Reset this

Politico, which seems to have based its journalistic integrity on the Drudge Report, has uncovered the latest Hillary Clinton "drama" at the State Department.

State Department reporters and observers have been buzzing about the brewing conflict since her second foreign trip, earlier this month, to Europe and the Middle East. On that trip, her longtime Senate press secretary Philippe Reines – one of the combatants in Hillaryland’s long civil wars – took over as the political staffer charged with handling the press.

The trip was marked by tussles over information and access, but it became known for a high-profile blunder in Geneva on March 6. There, Clinton met Sergei Lavrov, the dour Russian Foreign Minister, and cheerily presented him with a large red button in a yellow case, with the words “Reset” and “Peregruzka” written on it.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked.

“You got it wrong,” said Lavrov.

The error appalled some in the State Department, because the button – which was inscribed in Latin script, not Cyrillic – hadn’t been assembled with the help of State’s cadre of Russian speakers and professional translators, but rather by Clinton’s small political team. The day of the event, people involved said, Reines showed the finished product to officials who spoke Russian, but who weren’t native, or up-to-date enough to catch the error in a word out of computer terminology.

Let's review. For the last four years the Sect'y of State who, in her previous role as Nat'l Security Advisor, warned that failure to invade Iraq would lead to a mushroom-shaped smoking gun and on whose watch Georgia was egged on to take on Russia and Israel to invade Lebanon.

And a stunt gone mildly awry has "appalled" some at State. Oh. My.

But the story follows the template we've played off of oh these last 16 years. The ingredients are well worn by now: Hillary. Her henchmen pushing people around. Everything is politically calculated. Drama.

And in related news Mark Halperin reports on the Hasselback response to the banking plan.

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