Sunday, April 26, 2009

First 100 days 27 promises kept 6 broken

Since many are focusing on the whole "100 days" of the Obama presidency, I thought I'd take a look at PolitiFact's Obamameter and see how many promises were kept versus those that were broken.

Twenty Seven promises are shown as kept; six are shown as broken. I'm not going to bother with the ones that were compromises, because can you really compromise on a promise? You either keep it or you don't...

In reality only breaking 6 isn't that bad, though I do have to say the most recent one is troubling, It is:

"Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term 'genocide' to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. … as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide."


Twice the President avoided the use of the word "genocide" in relation to Armenia...I wonder how Armenians For Obama who supported him based in this promise feel, I did find this:
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ On April 24, the Armenian Council of America (ACA) stated with great disappointment that US President Barack Obama retreated his pledge of promoting changes in Washington’s policy, ACA reported to PanARMENIAN.Net. “Barack Obama did not keep is pre-electoral promise, and preferred to characterize the 1915 events as the ‘greatest atrocities of the 20th century’,” the ACA report says. Although the President has gone further than his predecessors by continuously stating that his “personal views have not changed,” he swayed on his pledge towards historical truth with the absence of the word “genocide”.

Nonetheless, ACA attaches great importance to the fact that the US President and his advisors realize that Armenia and Turkey cannot normalize their relations unless Ankara acknowledges the historical truth. “I feel deep sorrow that Obama did not keep his promise under Turkey’s pressure of refusing to normalize its ties with Armenia,” ASA Chairman Vazgen Khodanyan said.

5 comments:

Barga said...

x

Barga said...

crap, i posted that wrong (stupid ctrl x deleted instead of copied)

The problem is, he still has 1360 more days to go, so why are we looking if he has done any yet? With a few sole exceptions, anything he promised is still possible

Unknown said...

Because they've been focusing on the first 100 days of a Presidency since the time when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president....

Barga said...

I know that, but i still think it is stupid. When he says "i will do XYZ" he doesn't mean within 100 days

Cyberseaer said...

‘greatest atrocities of the 20th century’. Wasn't that the Holocaust? Anyway, genocide is a hidious word, but some words need to be said so that many generations to come can understand the horrors that have been committed in the past so that we can try and not repeat them in the future. Changing the language to make it sound more pleasant is wrong and should be stopped.

I agree with George Carlin who said that if we kept the term shell shocked instead of post traumatic stress disorder, then maybe a lot more soliders coming out of Viet Nam would have gotten the care they needed.

Whith that said, though I'm not on the Obama bandwagon, is this "broken promise" a little picky. No one is perfect and even I will give him a little slack on this. That area of the world needs to fix relations themselves before calling out the top guy of the US saying that he isn't saying a word that he said he would say. (I got a little confused at that last part too.)