Remember when George W. Bush dispatched his longtime political aide, Texas' Karen Hughes, to the Middle East as a State Department official to change Muslim perceptions of the U.S. and that promptly (and predictably) resulted, as Slate put it, in a "jaw-dropping display of ignorance and malapropism that made her the laughing stock of the region"?

In fairness to Hughes and the State Department, she was vested with an impossible task. How do you convince the people of that region to like you when you've spent decades bombing, invading, and droning them; arming and propping up the tyrants who suppress them; lavishing Israel with the weapons, money, and U.N. cover used to occupy and brutalize Palestinians; and just generally treating their countries like your own private plaything for war and profit?