A Truly Dumb Thing

Stuart Rothenberg takes a look at institutional differences between Democrats and Republicans. He's a little bit trite with a few of his observations, but he's spot on with one thing: the Democrat's push for an Armenian genocide bill may be a truly dumb move on their part – and it could do real and serious damage to them politically.

As former President Bill Clinton proved, Democrats are much better at publicly feeling people's pain, even if it occurred more than 100 years ago and all of the people actually involved in the incident are long gone. It doesn't even matter whether the United States was involved. Democrats pretty much are ready to apologize or commiserate for anything, anyplace and anytime.

Luckily for Democrats, we've had centuries of people oppressing people around the world, so there is almost an endless supply of brutalities and injustices deserving of attention, classification, condemnation and apology.

In fact, so many unfortunate things have happened over the past few centuries that the next Democratic Congress can spend pretty much all of its time, if it wants to, apologizing to groups and demanding that other people apologize, too. Democrats have only begun to scratch the surface on groups they want to apologize to.

The problem for the Democrats is that the controversy over Congress' steps to assert that Turkey was guilty of a policy of genocide isn't a laughing matter — at least it isn't to the Turks. Instead, it is the first truly dumb thing that Democrats may have done since the party won both chambers of Congress last year.

It now looks as if House Democrats may put the Armenian genocide measure in the deep freeze, hoping that everyone forgets about it. But while that may limit the damage that the party could cause itself, burying the measure wouldn't inoculate Democrats completely from the fallout caused by their initial efforts to pass the resolution.

I recently asked a couple of Democrats — an incumbent Member of Congress from a Democratic-leaning district who is on record supporting the measure and a long-shot Congressional challenger in a Republican district — whether they now favored the genocide resolution, and both acted as if the measure were infected with botulism.

I have been posting about this since the bill was, wrongly, I think, reported out of committee. The bill does nothing to improve the situation between Turkey and Armenia. In fact, it makes the situation worse for no good reason at all. That it also could damage – directly – American troops in contact with an enemy makes it more than just dumb. Rothenberg points out that making policy is more difficult than just criticizing. Funny how that works, isn't it?