Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a swipe in a Sunday interview at the proclaimed foreign policy ignorance of one of the leading contenders for the GOP presidential nomination.
When Christiane Amanpour, on her show "This Week," made a reference to remarks by former pizza executive Herman Cain that he didn't care who the leader of "Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan" was, Clinton replied, "There's a zero-zero-zero chance I'm going to comment on Republican politics."
As it happens, Clinton was speaking to ABC from Uzbekistan, where she is at the tail end of a week long, multi-nation tour that began with surprise visits to Libya and Afghanistan, and included stops in Malta, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
During the stop in Afghanistan, Clinton was caught joking with Afghan president Hamid Karzai about Cain's remarks, and his experience:
"He's a former pizza company executive," she said."Is he that?" said Karzai.
"Oh, yes. He started something called Godfather's pizza," she said.
"Yes, I see, I see," he said.
She continued about how Karzai had seen a news clip: "The president was saying he saw a news clip about how Mr. Cain had said I don't even know the names of all these presidents of all these countries, you know, like whatever," she said, laughing.
In an interview that went viral in early October, Herman Cain told a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network that he was prepared for foreign policy "gotcha" questions because he didn't see the need to know certain facts, like, who is the president of Uzbekistan.
"When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?" Cain replied. "And then I’m going to say how’s that going to create one job?"