Hillary competes with Geithner for competence nadir

What Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner does for the markets, Hillary Clinton does for diplomacy.  Maybe Hillary should have kept the “overcharge” button instead of giving it to Sergei Lavrov, since whatever she’s getting paid as Secretary of State outstrips her value.  Even Reuters can’t hide the embarrassment of Hillary On Parade.

Forget the fact that State can’t translate Russian.  Hillary doesn’t understand history.  She dropped this little gem on the European Parliament:

“I have never understood multiparty democracy.

“It is hard enough with two parties to come to any resolution, and I say this very respectfully, because I feel the same way about our own democracy, which has been around a lot longer than European democracy.”

The Greeks might beg to differ, and they’d have a point — since they invented the term democracy more than two thousand years ago.  The Dutch had a republic before we did.  And do diplomats regularly go to other countries to disparage the political systems of their hosts?  In other words, Hillary managed to screw up history while insulting the Europeans on her first visit as our official top diplomat.

And how difficult is it to understand multiparty democracy, anyway?  We have one on our northern border, for Pete’s sake, and they’ve been doing pretty well for as long as we have.  I thought Hillary was supposed to be experienced at foreign affairs.

But Hillary wasn’t finished.  Someone needs to get her some flashcards, stat:

One working lunch later with EU leaders, Clinton raised more eyebrows when she referred to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who stood beside her, as “High Representative Solano.”

She also dubbed European Commission External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner as “Benito.”

I’ve been calling the Obama administration “amateur hour”, but that’s too kind.  It’s the Gong Show, only with the media as the panelists, we keep seeing 10s instead of mallets hitting the gong.  At least the Gong Show had a sick, train-wreck entertainment quality along with its embarrassing incompetence, and it was blessedly over in 30 minutes.