May 28, 2008 [LINK / comment]
As Rush Limbaugh pointed out today, if a Republican candidate had made such a blatantly false statement as Barack Obama did on Memorial Day, the press would be jumping all over him. Now, I'm not one who incessantly whines about liberal media bias (the problem is obvious enough, but often exaggerated), but in this case, complaining is quite appropriate. When is "the first black Kennedy" going to get some serious scrutiny from the mainstream media? In a speech in New Mexico, Obama said, "I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps." See Washington Post.
WRONG! Auschwitz is in central Poland, which was "liberated" by the Soviet Red Army in early 1945. There were quite a few concentration camps in the western portions of Germany that were indeed liberated by the Western Allies toward the end of the war, but all of the extermination camps such as Auschwitz were in the German-occupied territories of Eastern Europe.
This probably won't matter to many of Obama's youthful voters, sadly, because for a lot of students today, neither history nor geography are worth learning. Auschwitz? Dachau? Buchenwald? What-ever!
UPDATE: I should have mentioned Obama's other gaffe that day: "On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong." Dead people in the audience?? Brent Bozell surveys this and other past whoppers by Obama, making Dan Quayle look very good in comparison. Hat tip to Patrick Carne.