MPs pull the mother of gaffes when addressing the US: Now they’ve done it. It’s bad enough that MPs embarrass us on a regular basis at home, but this is ridiculous. Eighteen members of our House of Representatives who lashed out in a letter to the US Congress (pdf) over the US State Department’s 19 July travel warning on Egypt drew a connection between the murder of Copts at the hands of terrorists and victims of gun violence in the US. It was somehow a bid to say that “perception is always worse than the truth in this part of the world.” Says a former State Department official: “All it does is irritate Americans enormously. … It’s dumb and all it’s going to do is irritate people and it’ll make [the authors] look sort of stupid in Congress.”