I don't want to break President Obama's healthfest. And I also don't won't to distract you from Jon Chait's and John Judis' analyses of how all of us got there. The Republicans still have some games to play in the senate. But the real delays will come from postponements of entitlements and other time-lag provisions included in the legislation itself.
Still, since it has been uniformly ignored in the United States and also neglected by the "progressive" media in the United Kingdom (including the BBC), I want to call your attention to a dictator's threat to 100,000 of his people. The menace comes from the Islamist prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the threatened happen to be two-thirds of Armenians residing in Turkey.
Now, as it happens, Erdogan was Obama's first foreign host after he became president on January 20, 2009. Ankara was the first foreign city he visited. No one missed the fact that it was a Muslim capital of a Muslim country that was turning more and more Muslim. (Riyadh and Cairo came after.) In any case, Obama was making what he thought was a deep point; and it was that the U.S. wanted to be friends with the Muslim world, no matter what. In the meantime, Erdogan has made fast friends with Dr. Ahmadinejad and Bashar Assad and become their political allies. And Obama has neither commented nor acted on these provocations.
Of course, Erdogan is still pressing for Turkish admission to the European Union, a journey that has been stymied by his telling Turks in Germany that assimilation “is a crime against humanity.”
But he has threatened a real crime against humanity by warning the 100,000 non-citizen Armenians who live in Turkey that he may simply deport them. Justjournalism.com has done an analysis of how the British media dealt with the cruel tip-off. Only the Times and the Telegraph reported on it at all. Reuters had it on its wire, which was picked up by the Huffington Post, otherwise known as the Puffington Host.
Nothing could have been written in America about how American media treated the matter. It didn't deal with it at all. Here, so to speak, is an American ally--an ally of the president, at least. He is menacing exile of 100,000 Armenians whose 20th century ancestors had suffered from a genocide by Turkey of at least one and a half million souls.
Anyway, in the U.S., none of this occurred, except in Ms. Huffington's journalism.
Imagine if Israel had threatened to deport not a hundred thousand Palestinians but ten.