This is what it is to be President of the United States. You have to exercise diplomacy.

We need their cooperation too much to make the Turks stop denying it happened; they have to do it themselves. And they will, sooner or later. A lot later. When there's not consequence for doing so.

Is Obama's "G" word genocide or Guantanamo? He made specific promises on both in 2008, and has done nothing on either. At least we have the ACA...

@2: I was going to mention Guantanamo. Our wonderful Congress repeatedly refuses to appropriate money to close it. So far they are winning.

He's not a Monarch.

@2: Further, passing the ACA cost Obama control of the House, and the Census of 2010 allowed so much Gerrymandering that it will be 2022 before there's a chance the majority of voters would elect a majority of the House.

This country is fucking itself over, not Obama.

One of the more ridiculous objections to calling what happened to the Armenians "genocide" is that the word itself wasn't coined until decades later and therefore (the argument runs) couldn't possibly apply.

That said, there is clear whitewashing of educational materials in Turkish schools, as attested here:

https://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/04/14/w…

—and a necessary first step is acknowledging facts.

@4, a minor quibble: it was low-information Democratic voters who (still giddy over Obama's 2008 victory) ignored down-ticket races or utterly failed to vote in 2010, causing power shifts in the 34 states (now 33) where the majority party controls redistricting. The otherwise-innocuous 2010 Census information was then put to its intended purpose with different results depending on who controlled the process.

@5 The quibble isn't minor because voters who wanted change already knew they had been had by the 2010 mid-terms and didn't bother to vote. Obama lost the house all by himself by pushing corporate health care rather than some version of single payer, not because he lost political capital to astroturf movements . This is what disenfranchisement looks like.

@7: oh bullshit. it wasn't a disenchantment protest non-vote in 2010. young people don't vote in midterms, old people still do. it was a classic midterm, excepting that faux news poured millions into the TEA party BS and making the ACA into the moral equivalent of baby-rape.

Americans, by and large, are lazy, inattentive bumpkins. the GOP knows this, and that's why they concentrate on destroying America in off-years.

@8 You need to give people something to vote for if you want them to show because that is the only way change is going to happen. Leaving it to politicians to do the right thing never works especially when they betray their campaign rhetoric at every turn. Considering the spineless non existent reaction of Democrats to having single payer taken entirely off the table when the public is overwhelmingly behind a progressive solution and to have tea party talking points at the center of the national discussion was clearly not the way to prepare for an election. I could see that at the time so it couldn't have been a very big surprise to anyone.