Promises, Promises

Chill, People! It Was Just a Campaign Promise!

by SusanUnPC

Lyn just e-mailed me to ask if anyone is tracking the number of campaign promises that Obama has broken. Do you know of such a list? I realize it would be rather long, and difficult to keep up. But one would hope. Here’s one of the latest, via Lyn, and from Political Punch blog at ABC News in “Despite Campaign Pledge, President Obama Refuses to Use Word ‘Genocide’ When Describing Slaughter of Armenians“:

Despite a campaign promise that he would boldly use the word “genocide” as president when describing the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the early part of the last century, President Obama deliberately avoided use of that word in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day.

“We’re profoundly disappointed,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, told ABC News. “All the more so because his statements on this in his record before he became president nailed it in terms the facts, the practical side and the moral dimension. He repeatedly talked about this during the campaign, and he was really harsh on President Bush, he said it was inexcusable that Bush refused to acknowledge that this was genocide.”

Hamparian says President Obama “finds himself doing exactly the thing he so sharply criticized the Bush administration for, which is being euphemistic and evasive. It’s a bitter thing for Armenian-Americans who really believed him and really worked hard.”

In a July 28, 2006, letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, President Obama protested her decision to recall U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John for using the G-word.

“That the invocation of a historical fact by a State Department employee could constitute an act of insubordination is deeply troubling,” then-Sen. Obama wrote. “When State Department instructions are such that an ambassador must engage in strained reasoning — or even an outright falsehood — that defies of common sense interpretation of events in order to follow orders, then it is time to revisit the State Department’s policy guidance on that issue.”

Obama told Secretary Rice that the “occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 is not an ‘allegation,’ a ‘personal opinion,’ or a ‘point of view.’ Supported by an overwhelmingly amount of historical evidence, it is a widely documented fact.”

But Mr. Obama’s statement today does not use the word. He calls the genocide “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century” and mentions the “1.5 million Armenians who were subsequently massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.” He uses the Armenian term for “The Great Atrocity” — The Meds Yeghern -– and he calls for “a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.”

But he does not use the word.

“He made it so clear throughout the campaign that that word mattered,” the ANCA’s Hamparian says.

That is indisputable. Mr. Obama said that “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president.”

SOURCE