Clinton’s State Department Can’t Translate ‘Reset’ into Russian

Our utterly brilliant Secretary of State managed to embarrass our entire nation today by screwing up a simple one word translation:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva Friday with a special present: a reset button inside a gift box with a ribbon.

[…]

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Lavrov pressed the button together at the beginning of their first meeting, and he said he would put in on his desk.

“I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama, Vice President Biden and I have been saying,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We want to reset our relationship, and so we will do it together.”

In addition to the red button on a black-and-yellow base, the State Department had written “reset” in English and what it thought was its Russian equivalent.

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

“You got it wrong,” he said, adding that the word he was looking at meant “overcharge,” though “overload” may be more precise.

Yup, that’s right, our state department doesn’t know how to translate English into Russian. Russian for freakin sake! The section of our government charged with foreign relations can’t even translate a single word into one of the worlds most important languages… pathetic. This just makes our country look stupid.

I mean she even tells Lavrov that our state department worked hard to get the translation right. How does that look to the Russians? I can’t believe Lavrov didn’t break out laughing. Seriously… doesn’t the state department have anybody who actually speaks Russian? GIVE ME A BREAK.

But perhaps I’m being to harsh… after all maybe they just brought the wrong button and the one they gave Lavrov was intended for the American tax payers? It’s a possibility…

UPDATE: Tommy Christopher over at AOL sees a different problem with Clinton’s gesture… yea, giving the Russians “the red button” is quite ironic but this administration hasn’t and doesn’t seem to want to learn from history so perhaps the irony is lost on them.