As you are aware, the President took quite a bit of heat last month from British and U.S. media outlets, when it was reported that he gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of American movies on DVD, as the official gift of his state visit. It turned out that the DVDs were not compatible with British DVD players, and worse, that the Prime Minister had a vision problem that would make the gifts even more distasteful. Gordon Brown gave President Obama a pen holder carved from the timbers of …
The media and pundits alike have skewered the Clinton State Department for giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a prop “reset button” when Secretary Clinton met with him in Geneva earlier in the month. Obviously it is a bad idea to reset relations with Russia only weeks into a new presidential term, especially given the number of outstanding sensitive issues that the United States should maintain some level of leadership on, rather than ceding all ground to Russia. But this episode also demonstrated a clear lack of leadership at the …
Can you imagine? It’s movie night at 10 Downing Street, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain has the popcorn popped and is ready to break into that set of DVDs that President Obama so graciously gave him on his recent visit to Washington. Then he sees the display say ‘error’. It turns out that the DVDs that the White House deemed fit as a symbolic gift of our relationship with Great Britain were not coded for the DVD players in Europe. Does the White House have a DVD player that …
