Dept. of bad diplomacy

The U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Deborah Jones, made a poor choice of words during a speech in Washington recently.

... she spoke about the four women who were this year the first female politicians to be elected to the Kuwaiti parliament. She said some of her Kuwaiti colleagues "refer to them as the four cats and I said does that mean the remainder are dogs in the parliament? I don't know, because otherwise I don't know what else unifies them but their chromosomal make-up."

Comparing anyone to a dog is generally a no-no in the Muslim world. Of course, Jones didn't mean this as an insult, and her innocuous remark is being blown totally out of proportion, with at least one Kuwaiti MP calling for her expulsion from the country.

Still not as bad as our previous entry in the department of bad diplomacy...