T1B

How Do You Say "Screw Up" in French?

I warned Big Guy not to buy Bill Clinton's old address book as part of the Hillary-to-State deal, but does he listen? Now I have this mess to clean up.

All of us here at the White House read French, so for those of you who can't, the article says that Big Guy accidentally sent an official letter of greeting to former French President Jacques Chirac, instead of to current President Nicolas Sarkozy. Guess that explains why the letter to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder showed up undeliverable the other day.

Now you know why we seemed so unprepared for our meeting two weeks ago with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain. We were expecting Tony Blair, and had all this really cool personalized stuff for him, but we couldn't very well give those gifts to Brown. It would've been rude, so we just gave him crap from the Smithsonian gift shop.

Big Guy is really ticked about this latest embarrassment, particularly since even President George W. Bush didn't make these kinds of mistakes. He swears he's going to repair all the damage next month when he goes to the G-7 meeting in London, where he says he plans to also have a long talk with Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev about re-starting START talks.