Is This Going To Be A Turkey Shoot?

It will be interesting to see how this mess develops, because it reminds me of two things which led to entirely opposite outcomes.

The first is the treatment which Occupy Wall Street received at the hands of various police forces in the United States. That, of course, led nowhere but to the irrelevancy of the movement formerly known as Occupy Wall Street, which is still around but is almost totally ignored. There were a few words of outrage, outrage I tell you, regarding the harsh treatment by “police thugs,” but no one in this country takes that kind of outrage seriously, so…

The other thing it reminds me of is, of course, Tahrir Square in Egypt, and we all know how that turned out. We don’t have Hillary Clinton around to tell us how Erdogan is a “dear friend of the family,” but John Kerry has probably been to yacht races with him on the Bosporus Gold Coast, so that might serve the same purpose. Obama is already hyperventilating about the noble qualities of Erdogan while urging both sides to remain calm and use “peaceful measures,” so we’re all set for that phase of things.

People in the Middle East are serious about their protests, though, and unlike this country they meet police thuggery with an escalation of violence instead of stealing off into the woodwork. So we will see before long if this is going to proceed to the phase where Obama is telling the world that Erdogan has “lost his authority to govern,” and that he must “step down immediately” or face some "serious consequences" which Obama will refuse to describe.

Events in the Middle East are not always easy to forecast, but Barack Obama is completely and entirely predictable.