I dunno, this story does raise legitimate concerns about whether Obama is soft on the Jewish Problem.
This is pretty stupid, but at least it’s about something that the candidate actually said. The pastor bullshit, on the other hand, was about stuff other people said.
I know, I know, “But he may have said it TO Obama!”
sigh
He should have left out the part about dodging Nazi snipers.
Hmpf. If he’d been a real man he would have kicked Hitler’s ass until he agreed to hold the camera.
And he never should have had Carrot Top along on the trip.
He had to bring Carrot Top along for the props. You can’t single-handedly take WW2 Berlin without a few convenient Nazi props.
-Joe
When it turns out they were really just German exchange students playing frisbee. (This just in- Sinbad says he saw no atrocities when he went to Buchenwald.)
Everyone knows that for snipers you have to have either Soviet or Finns involved.
“Uncle” is to “Great Uncle” as “Sniper Fire” is to “Girl reading poetry”.
Remember to study for the SATs, kiddies. Analogies are hard.
My father enlisted in the Navy between VE Day and VJ Day and the war ended before he completed basic training. I only heard him mention his (not exactly movie worthy) “war” experience a few times:
1- That in Shanghai he was essentially ordered to leave the ship he was on [the Taussig] by a superior officer who was irritated by the fact he never lift the ship other than for assigned duties and he wandered about two blocks until he heard a drunken version of “A Ramblin’ Wreck From Georgia Tech” (the Georgia Tech fight song) coming from a bar, went in, spent a couple of hours drinking American beer and singing college fight songs with fellow Deep-South college age boys, and went back to the ship (i.e. he basically did absolutely nothing in Shanghai he couldn’t have done at home)
2- That the first Christmas party he attended (his family was Jehovah’s Witness and didn’t celebrate the holiday) was in Hiroshima (or Nagasaki?) with the atom bomb rubble in full view.
If I were to tell the first story above and it turned out that it was Hong Kong instead of Shanghai or that it was the Florida State fight song instead of Georgia Tech, or the second part and it turned out that it was Nagasaki instead of Hiroshima or a tiny village instead of either, to me it doesn’t compromise the truth value of the story. It’s an error in the telling (and if it was indeed a small village where atomic ruins were visible and he changed it to the more recognizable city it was near, same story). For that matter if it was 1946 or if the Asian port was Singapore, same story. It’s still a “southern college football fans drinking American beer in a bar was his one willing leisure experience in Asia” or “he could see ruins from the atomic bomb blast at his first Christmas party”. would only be untrue if I found out my father was in fact stationed in Newport News or San Diego the entire time.
I’ve studied oral histories in my own and other families and it’s always amazing how much factual info survives and how much is completely fabricated. I’d always heard tales of my great-great-grandfather fighting at the Battle Above the Clouds the day my great-grandmother was born; it turns out that he wasn’t there but was part of the investment at Knoxville, his unit and everybody else in the cavalry having been stupidly deployed away from Chattanooga on the eve of the Union attack by order of the South’s most mentally ill and incompetent high commander, but in fact he was in a pitched battle that day in which 11 men from his company (which was down to about 70 members) were killed or captured, so his statement that it was the hardest fight of the war for him rings true. (My guess is that twixt November 1863 and my hearing somebody noted that the Battle Above the Clouds happened the day my great-grandmother was born and assumed that was the correct action, and it has a pretty name.) There are also stories in my family, some of them detailed, that upon research prove neither embellished nor misunderstood but just manufactured out of whole cloth- that ancestress couldn’t have been from Ireland because she and her father and mother were all born in South Carolina, for example, or that same story about a Confederate soldier on his way home seems to have happened in a whooooooole lot of families with little variation on details.
I’m guessing that in Obama’s case at some point in the telling “concentration camp” got changed to Auschwitz. The terms are not synonymous obviously but you can see how somebody who wasn’t a WW2 buff, especially in the days before the Holocaust was as much discussed and before the footage of the victims both living and dead had passed from breathtakingly horrifying to mundane video meme, might substitute one for the other in telling it to children. I think Obama’s intelligent enough to know that if he willfully lied about the matter he’d be caught since he’s been taken to task for so many casual comments already and so have his opponents, both rightly and wrongly. (I’m on record in these boards as saying I thought Hillary’s RFK quote was grossly misinterpreted.)
Anyway, while it’s indeed mighty white of some bloggers and pundits to forgive him for calling his uncle his great uncle, the degree to which they leaped on this non-story when there are so many THOUSANDS of REAL stories to jump on (war in Iraq, foreclosure crisis, gas prices, healthcare, and each with a thousand subheadings, and those are just a few of the major ones) shows a degree of bigotry and idiocy that makes me half expect to see the Death Mark in the sky. I do worry about these people come election time- how many will refuse to support anyone who’s not a Kool Aid shilling Bushite or Clintonista or white- but hopefully their influence is less than I fear. (And I’m damned sure that if Hillary somehow gets the nod then that won’t please them any better and I think that either Hillary or Obama has about equal chance of winning against McCain [that chance depending on the day’s weather/the price of cod in New Zealand markets/what Britney’s doing that day.)
I just wish we could all join hands with Lou Dobbs and learn the real problem with this country isn’t whether it was an uncle or a great-uncle or Buchenwald or Auschwitz or whether Obama is more half-white or more half-black or even whether Clinton or Obama is nominated. The real problems in this country are divisiveness, a lack of critical thinking skills, and Mexicans. (And bears of course.)
I thought his uncle was Hitler. It’s getting hard to keep track here.
One of the issues I heard raised was that Mr. Obama stated that the important point about this issue was that we should take better care of our returning soldiers. Which is a good thing to do, of course, but shouldn’t it also demonstrate the reasons why we should be on guard against dictators, terrorists, “ethnic cleansing,” and the like?
Well, you knew he was a product of a mixed marriage!
Ethnic cleansing and terrorism have happened in Iraq because we deposed their dictator.
Only weak minded fools with feeble imaginations still affix “gate” to a word to denote a scandal.
And racism… you forgot racism.
And racism. And Catholics, Freemasons, cholesterol, and Amway salespeople (if I need it in bulk I’ll buy it from a wholesale house or online, and that goes for the Amway salespeople too).
Them’s sound like fightin’ words.
Agreed. But what you’re proposing is a Gategate.
I haven’t really been following the Obama/Auschwitz dealie- mostly because I’ve been lumping it in with all of the other Obama non-scandals. I think it’s an incredibly good sign that this sort of thing is the worst that his opponents can come up with.