Buttons.

The CNN headline — when you click through — becomes "Kim Jong Un offers rare olive branch to South Korea."

Olive branch... nuclear button... ???

Kim wants to "work together to alleviate the tensions and work together as a people of the same heritage to find peace and stability" — but you have to accept him as an equal:

"The entire mainland of the US is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office. They should accurately be aware that this is not a threat but a reality. No matter how much America wants to attack us with their military might and nuclear power, they know that now we possess such great nuclear power and therefore they will not dare."

Is there really a button on his desk? Or is that just a figure of speech... or a fake button...



Now that was a fake laugh, but give the lady credit for laughing her brains out when she must have been enraged that some staffers got the word wrong (and wrote "overcharged" instead of "reset" on the button they broke off the hotel whirlpool for that embarrassing cutesy ceremony).

Well, if you haven't heard: It's cold out there.



"Listen, big boy/You’ve got me hooked, and how/I would die if I should lose you now!/Button up your overcoat/When the wind is free/Take good care of yourself/You belong to me!/Oh, eat an apple every day/Get to bed by three...."

Obama reaching out to the Taliban.

"He cited an argument he attributed to Gen. David H. Petraeus that 'part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us.' Mr. Obama added that 'there may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region, but the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex.'"

This idea makes sense to me, but I lack confidence that Obama and his people know how to do these things properly. He didn't get how to host a visit with Gordon Brown in the White House! And then there was Hillary and the reset button....

AND: More here.

Next: Cuba.

"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is trying to stabilize the nation’s banking industry..."

"... implement a housing rescue plan and prop up a plunging stock market – all with about 18 vacant senior positions, virtually the entire upper echelon of his department. The staff is so faceless that lobbyists have begun trading jokes about a 'ghost' bureaucracy, given the many empty picture frames hanging on the department’s walls."

Just give him a big plastic button labeled "fix everything."

So Hillary Clinton gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a large plastic button with the word "overcharge" on it.

Oops.

Got to give her credit though. She was drastically ill served by her people. What? Did they Google for a translation (of "reset")? Yet she handled the screwup gracefully:



I'd love to see her behind the scenes afterwards with whoever came up with that stupid button.

And then there are those screwups she can't blame on anyone else. "High Reprensentative Solano" and so forth....



AND: Don't touch it! It's the history eraser button!



IN THE COMMENTS: Peter V. Bella said:

Hillary's people screwed up? She gives the guy a stupid button like some college kid would do? She screwed up and big time.It is her fault. She is way out of her league. This is more serious than serving tea, being Bill's doormat, and being a junior Senator.

This is some administration. The Prime Minister of England gets some cheap DVS and the Russians get a stupid toy button. I wonder what Oprah got from her visit?

You're right. The button is incredibly stupid. I wrote this post in the middle of the night, between sleeps, and I was impressed that she weathered the incident at all. But in the cold light of morning the stupidity of it all is glaring.

AND: They should have asked Volokh:

Unless I'm unfamiliar with some alternative meaning — and one that the Russian foreign minister was unfamiliar with, too — "peregruzka" doesn't remotely mean "reset." "Gruz" means "load," and "pere-" means "over-"; "peregruzka" means "overload." (I take it that "overcharge" is used in the story to mean an excess of an electric charge, which is to say an electrical overload, not "overcharge" in the more common English sense of charging too much money.) Doesn't the State Department have fluent translators to do such things?

We see this one mistranslation. How many unseen mistranslations are there? Is it the same as the ratio for vermin sighting to vermin population? Or is it much, much worse? And also, why hasn't nuclear war killed us all yet?