Hillary cackled her way through a very embarrassing moment the other day when she presented the Russian foreign minister with a gag gift in an effort to show the Russians that we Americans have both a sense of humor and a new agenda. The fact is we do have a sense of humor and with that keenly honed senses of irony and tragedy. If I were to say to you I really want to “overcharge” you instead of I really want to “reset” our relationship what would you think? You would probably think I was distracted or that I was disingenuous of perhaps that I was just incompetent and could not find the right words to communicate a very important policy change. All of these are unacceptable at this level of government representation. That is unless this was meant to be a warning to the Russians not to get “over charged” with the clear foreign policy weakness that is inherent in the Obama administration. Unfortunately this seems not to be that well contrived. Hillary has now made her first major blunder on the world stage. It happens to pretty much everyone so this is nothing new. This situation just has too many levels of exposure of this new administrations shortcomings. Think about it – when we Americans see a red button we think about the nuclear launch button – a red button pushed to launch Armageddon. Is this just twisted irony? Did we just threaten the Russians? Did we just take the nuclear option off the table? What signals did the Russians take away from this debacle?

Hillary seems to have proven with one simple gesture that the administration doesn’t really care enough about the Russians to spend the extra time to get it right. That is not a good potential signal to be sending. This mess cannot be blamed solely on Hillary, according to the news it was Biden, Obama’s right hand man when it comes to international policy. There are two possibilities, either a team of incompetent translators is solely responsible or this was intentional and meant to embarrass Hillary. I hope it is the former and that these translators are working solely for the administration and not our intelligence community. This still begs the question – why would you as a secretary of state put yourself in this position? Hillary is smart enough not to have this happen again.

By the way, most of us would like to reset our relationship with Russia. We want to go back to the Reagan days when we spoke with conviction. This is not a time for slap stick comedy attempted by one of the least funny people in the world. This is a time for us to actively assume our position as a world leader.