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John McCormack is outraged by the double standard applied to meaningless goodwill gesture gaffes:
Can you imagine if this had happened in Bush administration?
Can anyone imagine the Bush administration attempting to defrost relations with Russia by making goodwill gestures? Of course you can’t, because for most of the time they were either in denial that relations were declining or they blamed Moscow for everything. Had they ever made such an attempt, they might have been forgiven if the prop being used as part of the gesture had the wrong word on it. Even if the prop was hokey, this entire “reset button” approach is welcome. I am concerned that it seems a bit too glib, as if the last decade or two of provocative policies can simply be erased from memory by hitting a button, but the direction for the moment is encouraging.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
I agree with you, Daniel, but it’s still rather ridiculous; perhaps mostly because the State Department couldn’t produce a person familiar enough with Russian to get the word right.
A button? Was the gallows humor intentional?
WRW gets it right. I’m pleased to see the attempt to help relate more positively to the Russians. But I’m stunned that State couldn’t get this one right; certainly we have native-fluency speakers of all major languages there. Right?
I assume the first hyperlink was supposed to go here. Doesn’t really seem particularly outraged to me…
Thanks for the correction. Outraged may have been the wrong word. I would say that his remark about the Bush administration is typical of the sort of mock outrage of the “just imagine what so-and-so would say if Bush did that” variety that we’ve seen a lot lately.
And, yes, one would hope that there are still some people in the State Department who know Russian fluently and should have caught this. The strangest thing for me is that the Russian word was spelled in the Latin alphabet, and they still managed to get it wrong.
Walt has a post on meaningless apologies here.
As someone who smuggled a cup with the Prozak logo into the hands of an irksome boss at a public meeting, let me suggest another possibility for the wrong wording on that button.