“Amateur” Hour At The White House
While the White House staff did this, the State Department should have vetted it. This is incompetence suitable for a 4th world nation. The BBC reports that Bush sorry over Berlusconi insult
The White House has apologised to Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi for a briefing describing him as a political “amateur” who is “hated by many”.
The “insulting” biography was included in a press kit distributed to reporters travelling with President George W Bush to a meeting of world leaders in Japan.
He was “one of the most controversial leaders” of a country “known for governmental corruption and vice”.
Only last month, Mr Bush visited his old ally, calling him a “good friend”.
The four-page description of Mr Berlusconi had been taken from the Encyclopedia of World Biography.
Berlusconi has been around for a while and supplied troops to Mess-opotamia, so he isn’t some new figure on the scene. He was out for a while, but the White House should have known who he was. Plagerizing books when we pay people to supply short biographies of world leaders is grade school thinking. There has to be a standard State Department briefing book on the G-8, and that should have been used. Uncouth doesn’t begin to describe these people.
7 comments
That photo below seems eerily appropriate to the Busheviks… maybe you ought to add it to this posting too 🙂 .
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I assume you meant the one for the “noisy brats” article. Tsk, tsk, that would be showing disrespect for the incompetent clown in the White House. A competent clown could pack his retinue in a Cessna, and wouldn’t need two 747s and C-17.
No no, the “I have the dumb” photo. A capsule description of the Bush Administration.
That is too true.
Funny… LadyMin and I were discussing Italy and Berlusconi last night. 🙂
Other than that… I have no comment you haven’t all heard before. 😉
See… I can be brief! LOL
Silvio may be insulted by it–but that’s only because it’s at least 75% true. And really, of all the people in the world I’m worried about insulting, the guy even most Italians don’t care for isn’t high on the list. I’m far more worried about the next time Bush decides to saber-rattle against the Chinese, given that they now own most of our national debt.
Oh, Silvio is a corrupt jerk in the mold of Rupert Murdoch, but you don’t publish that in an official White House background briefing. Actually he and the Shrubbery have a lot in common, with the emphasis on “common”.
My complaint is that these people can’t even do the simple things correctly, and they are participating in a conference of the 7 biggest economies of the world plus the US. We are in no position to annoy anyone as we owe them all money.