(Community Matters) The Economist on Barack Obama’s claim that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz and on the resulting conservative bloggers’ frothing:
As many have pointed out, it was, of course, the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz. Moreover, Mr Obama’s mother was an only child. An RNC spokesman quickly damned Mr Obama’s “frequent exaggerations and outright distortions”. A blogger at Michelle Malkin’s site suggested he was “spinning Clintonesque lies about Auschwitz to sell his government programs”. Red State ran with the headline “Obama Lies About Holocaust for Political Gain”.
And they’re absolutely right: It was, in fact, Mr Obama’s maternal great-uncle who served in World War II, and the camp he liberated, as a member of the 89th Infantry Division, was Buchenwald. Try to contain your outrage.
This does, however, put a different spin on Mr Obama’s response to learning that he is distantly related to Dick Cheney: “We had been trying to hide that cousin thing for a long time. Everybody’s got a black sheep in the family. A crazy uncle in the attic.”
Buchenwald was also a Nazi concentration camp where nearly 60,000 are estimated to have died. I think Senator Obama’s point is well made and the gaffe can be forgiven.
Community Matters 