Hillary Clinton was on This Week with Christiane Amanpour this morning. They talked about events in the Middle East (boring repeats of Susan Rice’s wah-wahs on NBC’s Hairdo Show), and Amanpour even zinged her with the fact that under Obama, funds for ‘democracy and freedom’ were half what they’d been under Bush, and could only go to NGOs approved by the Mubarak administration. Ms. Clinton took strong exception to that; when Amanpour said, “It’s indisputable,” Hillary in fact disputed it, pointing out that there are “differences in approaches under the same set of guidelines…that lead to…wah…wah..wah… Fail.

Sorry, Hillary, it is indisputable; the dollars spent are a matter of public record. Now you might have argued as some of the other folks in the administration did, that Obama was simply trying to repair relations with Mubarak, but maybe that trial balloon hadn’t helped in the past weeks, either…

But the point of this diary is this: Amanpour prodded, “The State Department just added an Arabic Twitter account and a Farsi Twitter account. What do you expect to with that?”
Clinton answered very brightly, her face almost manic with exhilaration:

“Well, what we expect to do is be communicating through the new social networking media with literally millions of people around the world, because we want them to hear directly from us what our policies are. We want to use it to rebut some of the falsehoods and accusations that are unfortunately made against the United States. But mainly we want to be in the mix with this incredible young, energetic population that is seeking the same rights to express themselves as young people in the United States.

Now call me a cynic (it’s hard not to be these days), but I’m betting that some of the corrections of falsehoods aimed at the US might be pretty funny depending on which truths you already know, and many you suspect.

Consider this a contest of sorts: What US policies will Rosey Clinton and Rosey PJ Crowley promote in Arabic and Farsi?

She already started out with the “Of course we support democracy; it just that we are experienced enough to know the history of how difficult the journey toward…wah wah…wah.” (Sorry: I’m predisposed to cynicism against such paternalism…)

And it would be great if any of you who know Arabic or Farsi keep us up with tweets going out from the State Department.