Every criticism or fact-check of Obama is a ’smear.’

But it’s not that easy to ignore Auschwitz.

It’s one of the most emotionally charged words in any language, for anyone who is aware of what happened there, and few educated people aren’t.

Perhaps that is why Obama chose to invoke it in the first place.

The word is significant in the context of the Obama campaign for two reasons.

First, because it has such emotional connotations, particularly for Jews, with whom Obama has had trouble closing the deal, it looks like he’s pandering to them. I’m not saying that he is, but it has that appearance.

Auschwitz was the site of the deliberate extermination of Jews (as well as Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others deemed “unworthy of life” by the Nazis) and one might cynically think that an attempt to say that one of his family members was responsible for the liberation of the camp would give that constituency a warmer feeling for him, despite his many foreign policy advisors who clearly are not fans of the state of Israel (e.g., Zbig).

It is of concern because it reveals a profound ignorance of history and/or geography.

Anyone familiar with the history of World War II knows that Auschwitz was in the occupied country of Poland.

Furthermore, anyone familiar with that history knows that American troops never advanced past the River Elbe, in Germany, and that the Soviet forces advanced all the way across Poland and into eastern Germany. Which is why there was an East Germany.

No one, in other words, familiar with that history, would imagine that an American soldier, under Patton, had contributed to the “liberation” (scare quotes because the Soviets never liberated anyone–they only enslaved them) of Auschwitz.

Obama didn’t know this. Nor, apparently, did anyone on his staff, since he had been spouting the same fable since 2002 and no one had bothered to correct him. Or if they had, they were ignored. I’m not sure which is worse.

Given his unfamiliarity with Jack Kennedy’s less-than-successful negotiations with Khrushchev, it makes one wonder what else he doesn’t know.

Brinksmanship

Tweety said he’ll be working on Saturday, so that means MSNBC will be covering it.

I read that story – the writer put it into perspectve. I hope those mofos get it.

I also followed the link to the Holocaust Museum and went on from there to other stories about that time.

Viewing the pictures of the bodies that were piled up and the mass graves and even the pictures of the emaciated prisoners brought me to tears – I actually cried.

I can’t believe that they could speak the words work camp as if that so how diminished the impact of the evil that the people in those camps (or even in that country) endured.

Dispicable.

I didn’t know Henry Ford was an anti-semite. I wonder what led his company to pay blacks an equal wage during very racial times?

I also wonder why it took the United States so long to help? Hitler was annihilating jews for ten years before any country helped.

IFFF they had all this dirt on Obama, they would have spilled it already.

An original story at:

http://jon8332.typepad.com/force_for_good/2008/05/fretting-whethe.html

In other words….let Clinton and her crew act like nut cases

I read at this link that Fox was anxious to burn Obama over the Auschwitz story, even to the point of diminishing his great uncle’s service. Apparently, when they discovered the story was true – except the name mix-up, they said Buchenwald was a labour camp not a death camp. The writer sets them straight about what went on at Buchenwald:

Using the Holocaust to Smear Obama

Poor baby. It’s those old anti-Bush people, isn’t it? lol

Isn’t it great!

Craig,

I hate the scrolling, I wish they would find their own place to meet and just leave me out of it.

Everyone else just sees him as an opportunist.

lol

Are you rejecting and denouncing poor Scott?

But if it helps you to sleep at night…

The spammers are freaking after that bombshell Scott McClellan dropped yesterday. This will hurt McCain in the general bigtime.

You’re acting like an ostrich.

(for instance, notice all the spam JJP is receiving today. Gotta scroll right through it to get to the real stuff.)

“I don’t have a visceral reaction to Barack Obama one way or the other, but I sure found his commencement address at Wesleyan to be pretty off-putting. He smugly put himself forward as an exemplar of the well-lived life, and proceeded from this to the more politically significant solipsism of imagining how much better America would be if it were filled with people who were a lot more like Barack Obama.

After some throat-clearing, Obama gets into the meat of the speech by offering himself as a role model for the graduating seniors:

But during my first two years of college, perhaps because the values my mother had taught me —hard work, honesty, empathy — had resurfaced after a long hibernation. . . .

I wrote letters to every organization in the country I could think of. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago offered me a job to come work as a community organizer in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plant closings. My mother and grandparents wanted me to go to law school. My friends were applying to jobs on Wall Street. Meanwhile, this organization offered me $12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.

And I said yes.

The single sentence paragraph at the end of this section has got to be my favorite part of the speech, though Obama modestly allowing that his evident virtues of hard work, honesty, and empathy are due to his mother is a close second.

What’s funny about his sacrifice is that when Obama took this job, $14,000 was about the average salary for somebody getting out of college. Of course, Obama wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill college graduate; he was an Ivy-Leaguer, who graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. A corporate career would almost certainly have been more lucrative — for a while. Last year, his family income was about $4,200,000. I don’t have the data, but I bet that compares reasonably favorably with the average household income of 1983 Columbia political science and 1991 Harvard Law School graduates. Nonetheless, Obama did sacrifice some of his expected credential-based wage premium for a number of years.

I’m pretty far from being a John McCain booster, but does Obama not get that he’s running against a guy who spent the directly analogous years of his life in a fetid jungle prison being hung upside down and beaten with sticks until his bones broke?

And I said yes. Cry me a river, pal.”

1) Iraq’s communities have largely stopped shooting at each other. That has been an achievement of the physical security efforts of our forces and I would highlight very courageous and determined Iraqi security forces who took extraordinary risk to make that happen and have fought in a determined way to make that happen.

2) Political accommodation at the local level has placed some social pressure on the Iraqi government to move in the same direction or key actors within the Iraqi government who represent portions of the communities who were fighting each other.

3)The effect on Iraqi society, the third thing that has changed I think, is a rekindling of hope.

4)The fourth big thing is Al-Qaeda is on its way to defeat. And this has had a big effect.

5)Point number five would be the militias are increasingly discredited, its linked to the point made earlier just like Al-Qaeda was rejected from the communities in which they were operating, we are now seeing militias rejected by the populations in which they had been operating.

6)the sixth thing is, no big surprise, the exposure of Iranian activity and Iran’s true intentions.

7)Point seven is that U.S. intentions are much more clear to Iraqis. Iraqis were confusing our activities with our intentions as we left them behind and their neighborhoods were taken over by terrorists and militias who were victimizing the people in those neighborhoods. So people were thinking, you know, maybe America wants us to fail.

8)The eighth thing – Iraqis understand their responsibilities.

9)There is a real commitment across all these communities to battle it out on the political battleground rather than at the end of a gun.

10)The tenth thing I would say is Iraqi security forces continue to reform and expand and there’s a slower degree of improvement in the area of rule of law which is, as you know has been a problem from the beginning but there have been some noble efforts there and some efforts that could be scaled up in that area.

Truly a tour de force presentation that all who wished to be fully informed must read.

http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.1722/transcript.asp