How far will the right-wing blogosphere go to promote the meme that Obama is “gaffe-prone” (I know, I know, stop laughing. They did support George Bush unflinchingly for eight years)? This far:
Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war. The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.
Buchenwald, as described by Wikipedia:
Buchenwald concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg (Etter Mountain) near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany (at the time, Nazi Germany), in July 1937, and one of the largest such camps on German soil.
***Buchenwald (German: “beech forest”) was chosen as the name for the camp because of the close ties of the location to Goethe, who was being idealized as “the embodiment of the German Spirit” (Verkörperung des deutschen Geistes). The Goethe Eiche (Goethe’s Oak) stood inside the camp’s perimeter,[2][3] and the stump of the tree is preserved as part of the memorial at KZ Buchenwald. Similarly, the camp could not be named for another town nearby (Hottelstedt) because of administrative considerations (it would have resulted in a lower pay grade for the camp’s Schutzstaffel (SS) guards).[citation needed]
Between July 1937 and April 1945, some 250,000 people were incarcerated in Buchenwald by the Nazi regime, including 168 Western Allied POWs. One estimate places the number of deaths in Buchenwald at 56,000 (discussed further below).
The Jewish Virtual Libary places the death toll at 33,462. The Jewish Virtual Library also tells us this took place at Buchenwald:
In or about December 1943, and in or about October 1944, experiments were conducted at the Buchenwald concentration camp to investigate the effect of various poisons upon human beings. The poisons were secretly administered to experimental subjects in their food. The victims died as a result of the poison or were killed immediately in order to permit autopsies. In or about September 1944 experimental subjects were shot with poison bullets and suffered torture and death. The defendants Genzken, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick are charged with special responsibility for and participation in these crimes
And this:
From about November 1943 to about January 1944 experiments were conducted at the Buchenwald concentration camp to test the effect of various pharmaceutical preparations on phosphorous burns. These burns were inflicted on experimental subjects with phosphorous matter taken from incendiary bombs, and caused severe pain, suffering, and serious bodily injury. The defendants Genzken, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick are charged with special responsibility for and participation in these crimes.
And here is some more background on Ohrdurf, the labor camp that was the sub-camp of Buchenwald that Obama’s relative helped to liberate, here, including this picture:
Prisoner corpses at Ohrdurf, although not as bad as Auschwitz.
Corpses sprinkled with lime and stacked like wood, but note- not as bad as Auschwitz.
So basically, Obama’s relative helped to liberate a forced labor camp attached to Buchenwald, with approximately 33,000-56,000 deaths, forced medical experiments, chemical weapons experiments, BUT IT WAS NOT AS BAD AS AUSCHWITZ.
This is going to be the longest, sickest election year ever.
*** Update ***
It is depressing.
nightjar
And if the wingnuts don’t come up with better shit than this, it will turn us all into blithering idjits. The newest brilliant line of attack is the new RNC clock on how long it’s been since Obama has been to Iraq. Well Obama will go and it will big news that Obama beats the wingnut clock and phony issue disappears.. Just how dumb a tactic is that.
ThymeZone
Mentioned many times so far this year, to be mentioned many times yet before it is over:
The idiots are talking to an audience that thinks God hid dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith. That the earth is 6000 years old, which is more recent than the invention of ink.
The idiots are not on our side. And we don’t care about the idiots. Screw the idiots. They will believe anything, like the idea that a 4-bladed disposable razor will shave you closer than a 3-bladed disposable razor. Okay?
Also, credits to the people who wrote the dinosaur bone and invention of ink lines which I have stolen from them here.
Mister Magoo is not going to beat Barack Obama. Relax.
andy
Even though I, uh, gave up blogging, the rampant ignorance or willful stupidity of the post linked above brought me back for one more.
That any thinking adult would use the word “merely” in reference to a Nazi death camp is incomprehensible to me.
Because, Buchenwald was “merely” a slave labor camp in the same way that 9/11 was “merely” some planes falling out of the sky. Pearl Harbor was “merely” a Hawaiian vacation gone awry. The possibilities of playing down the horror are endless!
evie
These are the same people who see Rachel Ray evoke subliminal terrorism messages. What do you expect?
Andrew
I just want so say, “Fuck you to hell you fucking nazi-sympathizing crypto-fascist double-dildo, double-wetsuited fat sack of shit,” to any one who makes any attempt to fucking make fucking excuses for Buchenwald.
You hear that, TalkLeft commenters? Don’t be fucking Nazi-apologists.
Otto Man
That sound you hear are Jewish voters being repulsed by this bullshit.
Thanks, Cheeto Squad!
Balconesfault
From the Transterrestrial link:
You know, I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb here to say that there are probably tens of millions of Americans who consider themselves pretty damn well aware of the history of World War II … who couldn’t have told you right off the bat that Auschiwitz was in Poland.
Sounds pretty damn elitist to suddenly declare that all these Americans don’t know shit about WWII, doesn’t it?
HumboldtBlue
That any thinking adult would use the word “merely” in reference to a Nazi death camp is incomprehensible to me.
They compare Abu Ghraib with fraternity pranks.
They claim Guantanomo is little more than a frat house.
They defend the deliberate debasement of fellow human beings as a just cause in the fight for scarves, freedom and the right to bomb whomever they deem needs it next.
They are Americans.
Jon H
Buchenwald was the camp where the original Ilsa, she-wolf of the SS was stationed. (Actually, she was called the Witch of Buchenwald.)
From Britannica:
Corruption? Graft? Degenerate orgies? Prisoner abuse?
No wonder the Republicans think Buchenwald wasn’t so bad. It’s right up their alley.
sistermoon
You’re right. In their (ultimately unsuccessful) quest to avoid “playing the race card”, the Rethugs are going to sink to unimaginable lows.
I really wish a Holocaust survivor would come out and tell them how truly offensive and full of shit they are.
xephyr
I feel like I’ve had to lean on the word “idiot” much too heavily these past half dozen years, yet it seems to have been designed so perfectly for this century. What madness…
Jon H
I’m waiting for a Republican to argue that Obama’s relative didn’t actually help liberate a camp, because by the time the Americans arrived the last Germans had fled and the camp was under the control of the prisoners.
Jess
C’mon, give ’em a break–they have to attack him on SOMETHING. They can’t just say, “well, gosh, he seems like a pretty nice guy, but could you please vote for the asshole we nominated instead?” Just sit back and enjoy the fact that this is the best they can do. Our best response is just to point and laugh.
KRK
Come now, John, you must admit that they’re holding back on this one.
Obama’s great uncle is apparently still alive. But Malkin hasn’t yet staked out his home to see whether he sports a toothbrush moustache or has a “G-d damn America” bumper sticker on his car. Nor has any Dr. Frist wannabe taken it upon himself to hound/interview the man and determine the truth of this alleged liberating-a-concentration-camp trauma. So I think they’ve been admirably restrained.
jake
OBAMA’S IGNORANCE OF THE HOLOCAUST PROVES HE IS UNFIT FOR LEADERSHIP BUT MY IGNORANCE OF THE HOLOCAUST PROVES I’M RIGHT!
There is no way anyone works this hard to be a complete and utter douchenozzle unless he gets his jollies from looking stupid and being mocked. I’m not saying we should stop mocking, I’m just saying nothing else makes sense.
Fixed.
slag
John-How often do you sit back, watch what these people do, and wonder that you were ever one of them?
They’re disgusting.
McCain confuses Shiites and Sunnis on a regular basis, and these people are concerned about the accuracy of Obama’s family stories from back in WWII? Would someone please remind neocons that there’s a war going on now–like today?
Kevin
Who the fuck is that transterrestrial asshole? What a disgusting piece of shit.
Splitting Image
“This is going to be the longest, sickest election year ever.”
Buy a bottle of good wine, keep it in a safe place, and open it when the first polls close on Election Night.
Then take slow sips all night long as the results come in, and toast each state as it’s declared for Obama.
By the time McCain concedes, you’ll be just tipsy enough to get out the real liquor and start celebrating properly.
AkaDad
Using the Holocaust to attack Obama, is without a doubt, anti-semitic.
El Cid
A Nazi concentration camp was really not such a big deal, but we in the right wing are deeply offended that Rachael Ray wore a scarf.
Chuck Butcher
I’m going to type this very slowly so I don’t break anything. My Dad flew in A26s and C47s in the Army Air Corps in WWII. The C47 was famous for its ability to fly on one of two engines and to achieve very short take-off and landing. Those airplanes were the quickest method of transporting food, medicine, and clothing. Liberating troops were out running their supply lines.
By the age of 10 I had seen photographs of recently liberated camps. Better and worse are not words to be tossed around. No one who knew him thought my father came back from the war much like the young man who went. I found the pictures the way kids will, my father refused to talk about them and they were put away for many years. You cannot have a reasonable discussion with him regarding Israel having any responsibility for the ills of the region. He is not, by the way, Jewish.
An A26 was a light attack bomber, a ground attack platform whose ferocity was unmatched until Puff (C47 – Vietnam). Besides a light bomb load the plane mounted 16 50 Ca. machine guns capable of forward fire in strafing and a 20mm recoiless rifle, a literal death hose for ground forces. To paraphrase, he’d felt badly about that until he saw the camps, they wiped that slate clean, they wiped clean the slate of the shattered cities, they wiped clean anything and everything that had happened to Germany.
He was a part of forcing German civilians to clean up in the camps, you do not want to know about coldness. To this day the memory of a sobbing teenage girl raise only scorn, no pity at all. He’s pretty damn conservative, but if you put him in the same room with the person who wrote that shit there would be things broken, at mid 80s.
So where do I stand? I’d hold a pistol on those wingnuts and make them clean one of those camps, no fucking problem.
Gemina13
My mother was 12 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and yet she still thinks Franklin Roosevelt was President for 16 years. She and my dad also housed a DP after WWII, an Auschwitz survivor. Wonder of wonders, she can only remember his first name, Michael.
If someone who lived through it has trouble keeping it all straight, imagine how hard it is for someone who was born decades later.
Oh, wait–did I just say imagine? Silly me, that only works for the Rethugs when it comes to
perjuring yourself on a regular basisdeclaring war against an oil-rich country.AkaDad
I’m concerned that Buchenwald-gate is the worst of the non-scandals.
TenguPhule
At some point we’re going to have to remove the Republicans from the definition of the human race. They look like us, they speak using words from our language, but there are no souls looking back from their eyes.
cbear
Sadly, it’s not just the goopers working this angle.
The Sun Queen’s minions are right there with them, and they have Agent Flowbee on the case:
Obama Family Military Lies
cbear
Sorry, don’t know why the Agent Flowbee link wouldn’t embed—
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/05/28/barack-obama-family-military-lies/#more-2765
El Cid
Look, these are the same people who consistently and proudly announce that they learned every possible wrong lesson of WWII, including their sneering hatred of any Americans who were once proud that our forces were known for treating prisoners honorably and without torture.
Martin
I propose the wingnuts start wearing serial number bandaids like the Kerry purple heart ones. That’ll show him.
Jon H
“Buy a bottle of good wine, keep it in a safe place, and open it when the first polls close on Election Night.”
Hell, it’ll almost be worth hiring a $1000-a-night hooker.
No, not the kind the Republicans will be voting for, I mean a woman.
wasabi gasp
i can haz 2009?
Richard Bottoms
Republicans are evil, so what else is new.
Joshua Norton
A good friend of mine can’t remember if his Grandma was in Auschwitz or Dachau.
What difference does it make? She was in a fucking concentration camp. To try to pick this apart is disgusting.
I wonder how the reaction would be if someone said “My Grandfather was a slave in Georgia…” and the wingnutz started spouting off “No you LIAR LIAR LIAR, he was in Alabama, blah blah blah.”
How stupid can they get? Every time you think they’ve hit absolute bottom, they find something stuck to the heel of their shoe and start reading from it.
Darkness
There is a really well put together section at the Imperial War Museum in London of the British Army liberating Bergen-Belsen (which, you know, not as bad as Auschwitz, and didn’t involve American soldiers to boot… so waay below radar)
Interesting thing about your comment. Liberating a camp was about the first five minutes. Then you have to spend the next year or so getting everyone recovered, the ones you can save, anyway. Basically you have to run the camp, which was never set up to be humane, and treat the sick… which is basically everyone. All with a war going on and few resources. Not something I’d thought about before seeing the gallery there. It’s not at all: “hey, nice people with guns have shown up, we’re saved!”
Some choice pics from the IWM:
Bodies as far as the eye can see… almost an impersonal number of them.
I think this poor fellow is actually still alive. Significant numbers died AFTER liberation; I don’t remember the numbers tho… That also wasn’t something I’d imagined.
Pay back time the German soldiers are getting a break from digging a mass grave… the Brits give them their breaktime lying facedown in the bottom of the grave.
There was a photo from the physical exhibit that really stuck with me. It’s these children sitting around a table and they’ve just been given soup and their faces and bodies are in such conflict, because here is food, but they barely move to eat it and the photo so captured that pain in their childish faces and postures. This is as close as their search engine would spit out (man too weak to drink his soup) There is something about the barely living, with that last sputtering spark of will to survive that is much harder to take. For me anyway.
Once you get into this level of evil suck… it’s inhumanly petty to argue any fine-line differences.
cbear
From the same No Quarter link I posted above—
Below is the 4th comment on the thread and a response to that comment:
Comment by tzada | 2008-05-28 17:36:55
I think he is lying about being biracial. I think he has not enough black blood to be a legal “black” person. I think he is more white than anything. I also think he has about 43% Arab blood. After 9/11 Arab is not such a popular shade to be. Especially if it is hidden. The Muslim Brotherhood vowed to destroy the USA from within. What better than to take over the White House.
Comment by Fred C. Dobbs | 2008-05-28 18:48:57
>>> What better than to take over the White House.
A little faster than buying up all the convenience stores and selling bogus Calling Cards, but not as cheap.
————————————–
Nice, huh?
Joshua Norton
Plus he used his uncle’s experience with PTSD when he came home to advocate for mental health screening for soldiers coming home from Iraq. Of course, that part of the story is not important.
Beej
When I was in 7th grade and we were studying world history, the father of one of my classmates came to my classroom to talk about his experiences in Germany and France in WWII. He brought along battle flags, his uniforms, other paraphenalia. He also brought along, at our teacher’s insistence, the photos he had taken when his unit marched into one of the concentration camps. I don’t remember which one. Today, I couldn’t tell you what the battle flags or the uniform or any of that other stuff looked like, but those photos have been imprinted on my brain for nearly 50 years now. So have the tears that man cried when he tried to describe what it was like to march into that concentration camp. So have his words and those of my teacher: “This must never be allowed to happen again.”
So it’s “merely” a forced labor camp, is it? How utterly despicable.
Dennis - SGMM
Remember that this is coming from the party whose candidate for president in 2000 didn’t know who the leader of Pakistan was. The same party whose current candidate for president mixes up the Sunni and Shia.
Then laugh.
b-psycho
Apparently being Republican means you take slave labor lightly, but see immigrants taking shit jobs (which the corporatist wing of the party actually supports, contrary to popular belief) as The Downfall of Western Civilization…
r€nato
I think the phrase we’re all looking for is, “a distinction without a difference.”
I have come to expect this kind of rancid trash from the right, but it’s truly sad that the Clintonbots are joining in.
slag
Something that’s been bothering me for a while: How does Memeorandum work exactly? How do all these lame stories show up day after day after day while the real stories are completely ignored?
Dave
I look forward to his next blogpost: “Compared to the survivors of Unit 731, those Battan Death March veterans are pussies.”
AkaDad
All the advocacy and votes in support of the troops, just means that Obama is a well disciplined Muslim sleeper-cell.
J. Michael Neal
Okay, rather than focus on the serious issues in this thread, I’m going to point out that this isn’t right, either. It’s not “Dansk”; it’s “Gdansk.” Further, “Danzig” was the rename, not the other way around. Gdansk was founded in either 980 or 997, depending upon what you count as the founding, as a Polish city.
A Different JC
OK, I’m going to play the “Jew card” on this play. I am named after two (great) uncles who were killed in the Holocaust. I don’t know where they were killed; it could have been in Auschwitz, it could have been in their homes by a mob, it could have been in a ghetto. It does not matter.
Seeing a pile of bodies – who for all I know contain my grandfather’s brothers – and to be told by ANYBODY that it is “merely” a slave camp is beyond obscene.
Yet, as my rational side is pulling me back, I have to say that this episode demonstrates just how much a Republican hates a Democrat: in order to attack a Democrat, a Republican will say that the Nazis weren’t so bad in Buchenwald.
Put another way, Republicans hate Democrats more than they hate Nazis.
J. Michael Neal
And wouldn’t I love to hear this motorhead try to pronounce “Gdansk.”
MobiusKlein
Tell me the Clintonites aren’t going there. Tell me they are just plants, Rovian rat-fucks posing as humans. It can’t be.
KC45s
Maybe this “gaffe” does have a semi-logical explanation. Part of the Auschwitz complex–Auschwitz II–was also called Birkenau (if memory serves, this was the actual part of the camp dealing with extermination). Look, if I’d been campaigning for months, I just might be capable of slipping up and confusing “Birkenau” with “Buchenwald.” Of course, allowing for this sort of mistake would grant that Obama is a human being. Can’t have that.
Killjoy
It’s times like this that I feel extremely depressed. This is exactly the kind of stupidity we’re going to have to combat every two years for the rest of our lives to keep America from running off the rails.
gypsy howell
Secret Agent Man Larry is on the case too, and has this to add:
Just another example, by the way, of the super sleuthing powers and amazing analytical ability that rendered Larry a former CIA agent.
And you gotta wonder what Hillary thinks of the fact that these are her most ardent supporters.
fecapult
Elie Wiesel stayed in Buchenwald for a while – he wrote about it in his book Night. Perhaps someone should forward this gent a copy.
Jon H
“Maybe this “gaffe” does have a semi-logical explanation. ”
It’s probably simpler. It may be that he never spoke directly to his great-uncle about it, and heard it from his grandmother, or his mother. If the guy didn’t come out of his house for six months, he probably wouldn’t be eager to talk about it except maybe to a spouse or another WW2 vet in the family.
If it was second hand, especially if it came via someone who isn’t a WW2 history buff, it’s entirely possible that “Buchenwald” would get transformed into “Auschwitz” in the retelling, since Auschwitz is the camp with more (ick) ‘mindshare’ and has (ick) become sort of a generic synonym for “concentration camp”.
Hell, most Americans, if asked, would probably say “Bergen-Belsen” is an imported beer.
r€nato
Of course they have a certain affinity for the Nazis. If it weren’t for the small fortune amassed by Prescott Bush through financing their regime, there likely would have been no Bush 41 nor Bush 43.
Voice of Reason
Thanks for that, John. Reading that idiot’s site was a supremely depressing experience — not just as an American hoping my country can climb out of the moral/political/fiscal hole it’s in, but as a human wishing for hope.
Tsulagi
While the retards are usually good for a laugh at the drivel they normally write, that is simply sick and pathetic.
Last week from those morons, Obama or any one else not in their dildo-carrying Party of Bush is a Nazi appeaser. This week the line is “Nazis at Buchenwald?….not so bad. They were just keeping sickly Jews off welfare and unfortunately a few of them happened to die while encouraging them to work.”
Darwin cannot come fast enough for these assholes.
Prospero
I think this Transterrestial asshole should try to avoid visiting some european countries after writing this. They have laws against this kind of thing.
slag
This explanation seems almost a given. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that this was initially Obama’s mistake. If anything, I figured that he didn’t apply his critical thinking filter on his family (not the first time this has happened). That said…seriously, why are we still talking about this? It’s bizarre.
libarbarian
I’m too pissed for words.
scarshapedstar
“Merely a slave labor camp”
Well, that’s a nice quote.
John, I’m really glad you turned away from the dark side. There’s an alternate universe in which both of us are trying to rationalize this abominable shit with “ain’t I a stinker?” sophistry like this:
It’s oddly appropriate that Terri Schiavo was a key factor in preventing this awful fate. But it could have happened. I’m not faulting you at all. It’s just that Bushism is a fucking brain disease.
Pb
Ugh. Note the 89th Infantry Division of World War II website:
Darkness
Forewarned is fore-armed and all that, and some of us have learned in the interim hell that a well-placed slap upside the head can still be in the service of peace and a functioning society. Stupid used to be self-limiting, not anymore. Whatever it takes to combat it.
Remember “how much damage can he do in 4 years?”
libarbarian
The purpose of the WHOLE CAMP SYSTEM was to wipe them out. Buchenwald was just one of the camps where they sent people they wanted to work before killing. The idea that you can neatly separate camps whose purpose was murder and those whose were “merely slave labor” is fucking asinine.
Too Angry for Words!
Brachiator
Goddamn, I hate these people who want to try to parse human misery and degradation for ideological purposes. The Times of London recently dedicated a page to the obituaries of women resistance fighters. You clearly get the idea that almost everything the Nazis did was historically abnormal. A few items (Heroines):
So there are wingnuts who have the nerve to pretend that they have some special understanding of what went on in Nazi camps?
Goddamn them. Goddamn them all to Hell.
A Different JC
Hey, Pb, thanks for the 89th Infantry Division website quote. Larry Johnson (no quarter man) has made some comments about Israel (on TPM) that I found problematic and now I see that’s because, no joke, he seems to harbor the same moral equivalences of Holocaust deniers. What a horrible episode. There are just certain things you should never get into an argument about, like which part of the Holocaust was worse than another part…
Enlightened Layperson
Okay, just for the record here, all the true extermination camps (i.e., the murder factories with gas chambers) were in Poland, not Germany and were liberated by the Soviets, although the author of the link John cites also denies that the Soviets “liberated” anyone. (Tell that to the inmates at Auschwitz).
The camps in Germany liberated by the Western allies were “mere” concentration camps, i.e., no gas chambers. But they were places of death and superhuman brutality and sadism. Ironically, the link John cites includes a link with graphic descriptions of the horrors of Ohdruf/Buchenwald. After hearing that some people being dismissive, I did some very basic reading about the liberation of the camp. How bad was Ohdruf/Buchenwald? As bad as the pictures and descriptions our host shows. So bad hardened combat veterans swore the worst horrors of combat they saw never even compared to it. So bad that Patton couldn’t face the worst parts of it and lost his lunch over what he did see. So bad that when local Germans were forced to tour it they fainted, including medical personnel who treated wounded soldiers and were no strangers to blood. So bad that when the local mayor and his wife were forced to tour it, they went home and hanged themselves.
I agree with whoever posted here. Anyone making light of Buchenwald should be sentenced to tour the museum there and interview or read the memoirs of at least ten survivors or liberators.
Mike G
Someone should sic the Anti-Defamation League on this mentally diseased asshole. They’ve torn people a new one for far less transgressions than this in terms of minimizing the Holocaust.
Enlightened Layperson
I thought the wingnuts hit an all-time low when they peeked at the counter tops of an ordinary family because their 12-year-old son used S-CHIPS. This leaves it all behind.
It is also a good reminder why we have Godwin’s Law.
Rick Taylor
To be fair, is this more than the work of one right wing blogger? I don’t think I’d ever seen him before this.
D-Chance.
Obama had a story with three simple elements in it: a person, a place, and a time.
He got the person wrong (great Uncle instead of Uncle), he got the place wrong (Buchenwald instead of Auschwitz)… I guess MUPpets should be happy he at least got the WWII part right.
And this was a “family triumph” story… proud soldier aiding in the rescue of tens of thousands and winning the War. And a proud moment it truly was; not only for the MUMan’s family, but for the entire world. How do you fuck up 2/3rds of that one-sentence tale?
Joshua Norton
“great Uncle” is some sort of gaffe?
You, sir, are an asshole. I always called my Grandmother’s brother “uncle” when he was alive. I still speak of him as my Uncle to this day. When he died, I found the following objects tucked into the back of one of his drawers:
Bronze Star for Valor
Silver Star
Distinguished Service Cross
Good Conduct Medal
My mother told me that he drove an ambulance (aka “meat wagon”) through the European battle fields, but what he did to deserve these medals, I don’t know. He never spoke about it to anyone, save for once, briefly, to my Grandmother shortly after the War, but took the details of those experiences with him to the grave.
So yes, you CAN fuck up 2/3 of a story when all you have is family stories that are handed down.
hamletta
May God have mercy on their souls…if they have any.
This kind of reminds me of the mishigas surrounding the return of Charlie Dean’s remains during the 2004 election. Howard Dean’s opponents were all too happy to impugn the integrity of the military Joint Task Force charged with finding and identifying the remains of Americans who died in Southeast Asia.
That was ugly, but downplaying one of the sites of the Holocaust?
Wow. That’s really depraved.
Oregon guy
I called my great uncles “Uncle.” I call my half-brother my brother. You’re an idiot.
A Different JC
Dude, Obama story was about how his uncle was so terrorized by the horrors of liberating a concentration camp that he hid in the attic for 6 months. It’s not a story of triumph.
Who knows where the facts got muddled, but any rational person will realize that to quibble over details (that likely as not were problems of family recollection or family retelling) loses the point of the episode.
D-Chance, I don’t know you, but I assume you are just trying out your troll-wings. Maybe you should wait for a bigger billy-goat before you attack.
TenguPhule
Why D-Chance decides to remain on the same side of the line as Redstate is beyond me.
TenguPhule
The knowledge that levels of Republican stupid are in places where they can still fuck things up beyond belief ensures we will not rest easy until they’re kicked to the curb.
A Different JC
Joshua Norton, thanks for that story. It’s the same with many of the veterans, and many of the older generations, in my family as well.
In fact, the whole “gaffe” nonsense makes me think that there’s an underlying message to the attack on Obama: that the GOP/Rightwingers want to deny that Obama has connections to America.
The Obama of the GOP is an African immigrant who was educated in Indonesia. The real Obama was raised by his native-Kansas grandparents who are as “white working class” as they come.
So the attack on Obama’s great-uncle is an attack on Obama’s legitimacy as part of America. Or, put another way, having an uncle who fought in WWII makes Obama too familar (too white?) for the GOP.
josephdietrich
If I may: Everyone who fought for the Allies helped liberate people from those horrible Konzentrationslager in Germany.
Mike
Rand Simberg is a low-grade moron and has been for years.
A Different JC
A good sentiment, josephdietrich, and true in the abstract sense. But Obama’s story (see here) was about how his great uncle suffered from the trauma of witnessing a concetration camp:
So the fact that the uncle *literally* was part of the liberation is important here.
Chuck Butcher
My uncle was with Patton on the break out until he was blown out of a truck and badly burned. He never talked about it, his military records after his death showed the family that he’d been in action 4 months longer than they knew. That’s his sister (mom), mother, wife, children did not know essentially anything including a Bronze Star. He was never near a firearm again. GI Bill, BSME – AC Delco entire career
I know little of my father’s actual service, a crash landing one of the photos I found, the forced clean up, the destruction of Germany, that if an A26 opened up there wasn’t room for a rabbit to survive on a football field. That is grim, coming at you at 300+ MPH. GI Bill (UofMI) BSME – various pattents & national awards
My 2nd cousin started in N Africa to end, infantry, nobody knows anything about that, GI Bill – PhD in Geology
My Dad is the last WWII vet left in the family, he’s pretty old.
These people are important to me and f-wads devaluing what they did and what they suffered and what kind of hell they saved human beings from pushes some very bad buttons with me. Those photographs are seared in my memory, I can see the ammo bag they were tied up in, remember the smell of it, and the first couple – my dad a kid in a uniform, in one grinning like a monkey in front of a crashed A26 (I’m fucking alive), and then the camps and that was real bad. It was like a car crash happening, where you can’t look away but you know it’s gonna hurt real bad, and it wasn’t TV or movie magic it was real and I knew enough history to know what I was looking at. I’m 55 years old and my throat is all tight, remembering.
josephdietrich
Except that it is not important at all, it’s a lot of bulljive about nothing. So he said KZ Auschwitz instead of KZ Buchenwald. So what? The basic story is still pretty much true. He saw horrors at a concentration camp.
My ex’s grandfather was on a ship that went down in the South Pacific, but I can’t remember its name. That doesn’t mean, however, that the trauma of the experience for him was any less real, and that if I tell other people about his trauma that my story is any less authentic.
But back to my point; by the narrow definition these folks want to use, America veterans had no role in the liberation of any of the extermination camps, since they were all in the east. Is this really what they want to argue?
Studly Pantload
D-Chance: At least Obama didn’t attempt to tell his story whilst ducking sniper fire from Bosnian hillsides. ‘Cause, like, everyone knows that’d be kinda laughable and stuff.
Oh, and how’s getting each and every delegate from FL and MI seated working for you? That going well? They all getting seated? Looks like Hillary’s going to swamp Obama at the very end, clutching victory from the jaws of defeat? Big sigh of relief from her diehard supporters? Not so much the rearranging of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic as most were finally predicting? Come from behind win for the books? Maybe McCain’s camp was a wee bit off the mark attempting to engage Obama as of late instead of Hillary? Looking like pantsuits will be the to-die-for outfit for the fall? Do tell! Do tell!
A Different JC
Precisely. What I suggested above is that the rightwingers who are attacking Obama are being forced to mitigate the Holocaust. That’s how nuts they are.
Studly Pantload
Oops, typo housekeeping: Did I type “Moldavian hillsides”? I meant to type “Bosian hillsides.”
Please to be pardoning.
Martin
Easily. Let’s walk through some of what I’ve been corrected on in the last decade or so:
1) My parents weren’t married when I was conceived.
2) My grandmother’s sisters daughter is really her daughter from an annulled marriage adopted within the family and so is actually my aunt. Her son (now my first cousin) was also adopted.
3) I have a first cousin my age, put up for adoption, who actually went to high school with a person I now know who grew up 3 times zones from me. Turns out this person I met after college knew more about my cousin than I did until quite recently.
Some of what I’m reasonably sure of, but may well be wrong on details:
1) My grandfather did 3 tours in the pacific and was at Iwo Jima (I know he was there from photos). Suffered from PTSD and spent most of his remaining life in the VA hospital.
2) My great uncle (who I also call uncle) did his first tour as a D-Day medic. He also came home with PTSD.
3) Another great uncle lost his leg in France.
4) Another great uncle was wounded in Italy and lost sight in one eye.
5) Several other great uncles (Roman Catholic Irish family – there are uncles everywhere) served but weren’t wounded.
6) My grandmother was wounded while serving as a nurse on a troop ship in the atlantic and received a medical discharge.
None of these people are alive to confirm the details. Very little information came directly from them and was relayed to me by people closer to them. I know some of the details first hand (particularly about my grandmother), but learning them as a kid, I don’t always trust that what I understood then aligns properly with what I later learned about the war and aren’t mashing together two different things.
Studly Pantload
Or, “Bosnian hillsides.”
Or . . . or . . . this place!
schtum
And so the same people who, not 24 hours ago, were giggling over how they thought the left would try to “rehabilitate” Scott McClellan are now trying to rehabilitate a Nazi concentration camp. You stay classy, Republicans.
Ted
That’s the heart of it right there. They want to make him a completely first generation American, which requires delegitimizing his mother’s side of the family in whatever way possible.
laneman
Sorry, John, you are now enemy #1.
You have the audacity to actually admit mistake and then call others on their mistakes.
Bad John, bad.
jake
No, it is beautiful. Let them get on with it. I hope they keep this up for weeks. If they make international news I plan to stop whatever I’m doing and have a celebratory drink. I want the whole world to see these deranged dipshits unloading round after round into their own feet.
Oh please let the puking fucktards go after these guys.
Dance motherfucker!
Tommy
The right-wingers continue to crow about how the surge is such a success, but conveniently ignore the fact that this success demonstrates that the death rate that preceded it was the result of having too few “boots on the ground” in the first place. I guess that was Clinton’s fault …
cleek
the guy in the link writes:
(read this in the voice of Cliff Claven, please)
of course he names the wrong river and is corrected in the fourth comment.
faaaagggggggyyyyooooo, ya wingnut jagoff.
bostondreams
Anybody else catch the lovely little ‘the leftist Hitler’ bit in his rebuttal to the criticism? Where is Jonah Goldberg when you need him?
Otto Man
One of Dan Riehl’s moron squad tried to contact the 89th’s website to get the dirt on Obama’s great uncle, and instead received the greatest bitch slap in the history of bitch slappitude. Enjoy.
r€nato
I too refer to my more-distant relatives as, ‘uncle’, ‘aunt’, or ‘cousin’, even though they may actually be second cousin or my grandmother’s cousin or some such.
It’s pathetic how far these jagoffs will go to support their meme.
Dork
And to think, they court the Jewish vote. I’d love Riehl to say this schtik in front of South Florida audience. They’d be carrying his ass out on a stretcher in 30 seconds flat.
Krista
Remember our erstwhile friend, TalDave? He commented on that thread.
Isn’t that special?
cleek
more unification from Hillary:
must.not.type.what.i’m.thinking.
Tim F.
Speaking for myself and other Jewish people I know, this is too disturbing for words. It’s literally like inspecting Anne Frank’s countertops.
Watching these stupid schmucks freak out when their retard president makes up stories on a daily basis, and their proud presidential candidate repeatedly fails to tell Sunni from Shia, just makes the whole display that much more pathetic.
John
Whuh? Auschwitz was a German rename, although the German name had existed long before 1939. But Danzig was a German city, inhabited almost entirely by German people who called it Danzig. It wasn’t even part of Poland – it was a free city under the authority of the League of Nations, although Poland controlled its external affairs. The name Gdansk (not “Dansk”) was always the Polish name of the city, but the city hadn’t been inhabited by Poles since at least the 14th century, if ever. This is like saying that Wien was renamed Vienna during the British and American occupation in the 1940s.
So, no, Transterrestrial, you don’t get to lecture other people about their lack of knowledge of history, given that you display a rather ferocious ignorance, yourself.
Also, to argue a bit with J. Michael Neal, who pointed out something similar, but not quite the same:
The claim that Danzig/Gdansk was ever a mostly ethnically Polish city before 1945 is questionable. The city was already heavily Germanic in character by the 13th century, which is when it really emerges as a major settlement. After its destruction and rebuilding in the 14th century, it was wholly German down to 1945. The names “Gdansk” and “Danzig” both emerged graduatelly as the standard Polish and German names for the city, but, at least since the 13th century, “Danzig” is closer to what the inhabitants called it than “Gdansk” is, down to when the former inhabitants were expelled in 1945. By any reasonable standard, the city was renamed “Gdansk” in 1945 when the Poles and Soviets kicked out the Germans and refounded it as a Polish city. To say that its name was originally Gdansk and that it was then renamed (when? some time during the Middle Ages?) as Danzig is to misunderstand the way the Middle Ages worked. By the time we emerge into an era when the city had any kind of standardized vernacular name (probably not before the 17th century or so), Danzig was the name in use, and some variety of Danzig had nearly always been the primary name of the city, except perhaps in its first couple of centuries, when its ethnic makeup is not at all clear.
Krista
That’s beautiful. Raymond Kitchell, you’re a hero for your service, and you’re a hero for standing up to those troglodytes and giving them the response they deserve.
r€nato
Have they investigated Charles Payne’s countertops yet?
jibeaux
Otto Man stole my idea, but I’ll just quote it here for those too lazy to follow links or read yesterday’s thread…
I still like thinking about the Obama Gaffe-a-Day calendar idea. I think we have January 1 -3 taken care of. Granted, they’re really boring and require a really long and offensive footnote, probably won’t be quite as strong a seller as Mr. Food on Your Family, but, hey it’s gonna be a long campaign season. We might make it up to MLK Day by the time he’s inaugurated.
b. hussein canuckistani
Jesus pigfucking Christ, this makes me sick.
I hate to say this, and I’m sorry for all you sane people, but you need McCain to win this election so that these steaming coils of bumloaf get the president they deserve. Sorry if that seems harsh, but I can’t think of any other way for the universe to collectively punish these scumbags.
The rest of you are all welcome up here, of course.
Pug
This update by the lame brain is very telling:
I did not say, or imply, that the leftist Hitler’s crimes were a “drop in the bucket” compared to the leftist Stalin’s.
Hitler and Stalin were both “leftists”, see, even though they were bitter enemies and philosophical opposites. Hitler liked organic food, see. So there. They’ve really gone round the bend.
Simply because one of Barack Obama’s relatives participated in one of the truly historic and decent things ever done by Americans, that event must be denigrated. These people are beyond pathetic.
Bob In Pacifica
And thanks to Prescott Bush doing such a swell job managing Nazi investments for Brown Brothers Harriman, the Nazis were able to afford so many slave labor/death camps.
NickM
Ever notice that “not as bad as Auschwitz” is becoming a right-wing reply in many situations?
b. hussein canuckistani
Then again, I’ve been contemplating this, and maybe there is hope for you. Continue with the plan to elect Obama, and watch the worms squirm.
El Cid
Raymond Kitchell, we salute YOU. Thank you for your service, then, and now.
Dennis - SGMM
From Reuters “Tales from the Trail” blog:
El Cid
“Not much fun in Stalingrad…”
rachel
Let’s see… “Abu Ghraib was not as bad as Auschwitz.” Yup. That sounds familiar.
Person of Choler
Chickenhawk Issue?
I think it is pretty safe to say that Obama will be the next President. Will he be qualified to send troops into combat, given his lack of military credentials? If the Mexican Army crosses the Rio Grande riding elephants and accompanied by mariachi bands, will Obama be able to order a counterattack, or will he be accused of chickenhawkery?
Hearing stories about an uncle hiding in an attic for 6 months after WWII does not make for much a martial background, you know.
Dennis - SGMM
The use of the “not as bad as” comparison will become even more important to Republicans as the year goes on:
“Bush was not as bad as Hoover.”
“McCain is not as bad as Granpa Simpson.”
“Cheney was not as bad as Rasputin.”
Punchy
So, when does Dunkin’ Donuts admit that, yes, Auschwitz was much, much worse than the summer camp at Buchenwald, and, by the way, is there anything else the right would like us to say or do?
El Cid
Well, given that the bad actor and tattle-tale Ronald Reagan saved us all narrowly from the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who were going to drive up through Honduras, Guatemala, and all of Mexico to invade Harlingen, Texas, where we’d be totally defenseless, one can only hope.
Face
This revelation that Buchenwald was only a slave labor camp is absolutely devestating news for Democrats.
Dennis - SGMM
Considering the state to which Bush has reduced the Army we’d probably have to ask for terms anyway.
Zifnab
Ok. So just to rehash. Obama says, “My uncle liberated Auschwitz”. Wingnuts leap into what we will euphemistically refer to as ‘fact check mode’ and turn up two ground-breaking discrepancies. Firstly, it was Obama’s grand uncle, not his Uncle. Secondly, he liberated Buchenvald, not Auschwitz.
In order to get some extra mileage out of these two facts, the wingnut’o’sphere needs to show that a) grand uncles don’t count and b) Buchenvald doesn’t count. To do that, they claim Buchenvald is a red state and won’t be voting for Obama in the gener… wait wait, I slipped into a game of Clintonball for a second there.
I’m sorry, all these arguments from stupidity are beginning to blur together in my brain. All I keep hearing is that Obama can’t be President because such-and-such a reason that is never clearly articulated. Something to do with Nazis, red states, and secret Muslim Communists. I just don’t even know anymore.
r€nato
I hope he means that.
Apsaras
I sure hope President Bush shares some stories about what his family was up to during World War II. I’m sure it’s very… er… inspiring
libarbarian
My family has an live-in stenographer on hand specifically to avoid just these kinds of mishaps.
Why doesn’t Obama’s family have one and doesn’t that call his ability to fight terrorists into question?
Mike
Actually, it is. His father enlisted in the Navy and became its youngest pilot. He flew 58 missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Bob In Pacifica
Yeah, Jeralyn over at TalkLeft was working the Buchenwald angle too. I imagine if you sat down Jeralyn, Chris Matthews, Rush Limbaugh, etc., and gave them each a list of the concentration camps of WWII and asked them to say who liberated what I doubt that they’d do particularly well. At least before it became oppo research. Okay, maybe Rush was a Naziphile in grade school and secretly dressed up in the regalia and marched around his bedroom pre-pustule on his buttocks and so he may actually have memorized them. Not the others, though.
D.N. Nation
I’m sorry: This is friggin Holocaust denial. From the same crew that gobbled up “Liberal Fascism.” Lovely.
My grandfather drove boats ashore at D-Day. Still talks about rumbling over dead bodies and kicking guys who were scared stiff off the boat. Now, you’re right in thinking he survived it all for the sake of living on with his pals, instead of some nebulous “fighting for freedom” thingy, but I will say this: He DEFINITELY didn’t do it so chickenhawk chickenshits could wank off so much that they’re practicing Holocaust denial just to ensure a guy won’t get elected.
Shinobi
I don’t usually throw Godwin’s around very liberally. However I strongly feel that the only people who would make comparisons between the horrors experienced at the variance concentration camps set up during WWII are Nazis.
Shinobi
Variance = Various. That’s what I get for being a statistician.
scarshapedstar
Has anyone ever noticed that the Wingnut Seal Quality is that a post “strikes a nerve”?
Yep! Granted, they’re denying the Holocaust, but if the libtards are this angry they must be doing something right!
Dennis - SGMM
WWII: ancient history. Clinton is fighting to liberate Florida and Michigan as we write.
4tehlulz
Yeah, please. Continue striking that nerve. It’s a real winner for you!
TheFountainHead
Uhmmm, this is the greatest thing I’ve heard all week. The Bitchslap Heard ‘Round the World.
grumpy realist
I’m sure the argument “it wasn’t an extermination camp, it was just a slave labour camp” was used by certain people at Nuremberg. And as mentioned above, the same argument is used by Holocaust deniers.
Nice bunch you’re running with, NoQuarter guys!
b. hussein canuckistani
That wasn’t Reagan who saved you, it was the Wolverines. I saw the documentary. Although I guess Reagan did inspire them.
over_educated
That is the most awesome thing that has come out of the election so far. JC you need to link this.
Paul L.
Buchenwald == Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Of course, this outrage is from the guys who compared Gitmo to Soviet Gulags.
The Moar You Know
You are correct. H.W. did some good work in the Pacific theater. Survived a baliout and everything. A bit earlier, his father, Prescott, was selling IBM punch-card machines to the Nazis, in direct defiance of American law.
What were those punch-card machines used for? I know you want to know – they were used for keeping records of where every Jew in Germany and the occupied territories lived, so that it would be easy and convenient to round them all up and ship them off to the camps.
Heckuva job, Prescott.
The grandson definitely takes after grampa more than his dad, that’s for sure.
jibeaux
But I’m sure Prescott only sold the punch-card machines for record-keeping for slave labor, not death, camps, right? That’s not nearly as bad, of course.
4tehlulz
I wonder if Paul L. received a nice human-skin lampshade for his trouble. I hate to think that he’s defending Holocaust deniers for free.
jrg
Oh. My. God. The asshats at “Sweetness and Light” have actually sunk to comparing WWII veterans to Cindy Sheehan. They also seem to be declaring that Nazi work camps were no big whoop. Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.
Can we call these people fascists yet? It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, that’s for sure.
The Moar You Know
I’d also like to throw this idea out there, for the benefit of D-Chance-tard and the rest of his vile, soulless ilk; this really isn’t about Obama anymore. This is a lot bigger.
This is about those who would seek to devalue those who lived through what is literally hell on Earth.
To say that “Ohrdruf was just a work camp, not a death camp” is to miss the point, to put it mildly. Of course, such ignorance cannot be anything but willful – a two-year old knows better.
To willfully indulge in such ignorance for the benefit of a political argument transcends evil – put simply, those who indulge in such reasoning are monsters not worthy of the label “human being”.
Paul L.
4tehlulz, How am I a Holocaust denier defender if I accept and quote the following statistics.
Buchenwald: 56,000 Deaths
Auschwitz: 1.1 million Deaths
rachel
Oh, my God! Paul L. has enlightened me, and now I see that Buchenwald was nothing serious at all.
Fuck you very much. Seriously.
Andrew
Can we get Paul L.’s user name changed to “Paul L. (Nazi apologist)”?
rachel
Oh, yes, and: you pusillanimous squealing troll.
cleek
what does pie have to do with Buchenwald ?
Tim F.
Honestly, I’m glad that this controversy happened. It’s had to imagine a more definitive way for the party uber alles wingtards to stand up and identify themselves.
Paul L we already knew. Dan Riehl was a gimme, and we already knew that TallDave would sooner gnaw off one of his legs than admit an unforced error on his “side.” Still, I have to admit that D-Chance was a surprise.
4tehlulz
Apparently, in Paul L.’s world, a death camp is only a death camp if the death toll hits 7 figures, but really, isn’t Auschwitz really just a large work camp with a high turnover rate? After all, work was done in both.
4tehlulz
You don’t want to know what they used for filling. Just sayin’.
The Moar You Know
Keep digging, Paul L. You’re making yourself look better and better with every comment you post.
Breschau
Wow, that transterrestrial wingnut is really something else. He actually wrote this in one of the comments in his blog post, in an unironic fashion:
I repeat: HE WAS NOT BEING IRONIC.
Wow.
rachel
Don’t be stupid, be a smarty,
Come and join the Nazi Party!
…Do we really need another remake of The Producers?
4tehlulz
His art sucked.
El Cid
Why do people whine so much about the fact that a lot of people died when the Khmer Rouge made them work in fields without a lot of food?
After all, a lot of peasants throughout history worked a lot with not much food and died.
What’s the big whoop?
And what’s the deal with all these people whining about ‘mass graves’ from Saddam Hussein? It’s not like people in cemeteries aren’t buried in sort of a ‘mass grave’, I mean, if you take away all the headstones and stuff.
What’s really horrific is when the liberal PC Nazis keep us from smoking, or suggest that maybe on occasion the child of an illegal immigrant can go to a state-supported school. That is real horror.
Killjoy
Be fair to Paul L. He’s not a Nazi apologist, he’s a Buchenwald Nazi apologist. He’s just saying out of all the Nazis running death camps, those guys at Buchenwald weren’t so bad. Those rat-bastard Auschwitz Nazis gave the comparatively upstanding Buchenwald Nazis a bad name.
r€nato
the socialism, duh!
…seriously, this is EXACTLY the same argument as anti-semites, Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists regularly make. “That Hitler guy just went a little too far.” As if, had he killed only a few hundred thousand Jews and not tried to fight a two-front war before he was prepared, he would have turned out to be a decent fellow.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
This is where we seperate the humans from the Gaultiers.
Krista
So Paul L., just for argument’s sake, if your next door neighbour were to be raped up the arse with a red-hot poker, would you be upset if I reported that you were merely raped up the arse with a lukewarm one?
4tehlulz
Yeah, but are they worse than Illinois Nazis? That’s what I want to know. Cuz I hate Illinois Nazis.
Fledermaus
Oh.My.Gawd.
tThis is just awesome. It appears that the flying keyboarders took it upon themselves to write to a website dedicated to those who have served in 89th. The reply is wonderful.
Desmond
For anyone who hasn’t already, go here:
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/05/28/barack-obama-family-military-lies/
to swear at that fucking piece of shit Larry Johnson for lying about Obama’s family history and minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. It’s actually quite cathartic.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Because the numbers aren’t the point.
Auschwitz and Buchenwald (as well as Birkenau, Dachau, etc.) were part of a larger program of torture and genocide. Morally and ethically, Buchenwald is equal to Auschwitz. So different camps specialized in different aspects of that genocide; Buchenwald worked its prisoners to death and performed inhuman experiments on them, while Auschwitz just gassed ’em outright. It doesn’t matter. Both camps were working towards the larger goal of exterminating millions of people.
Arguing numbers misses the point by several parsecs. Both camps were part of the Final Solution; both were Just As Bad as the other.
Cris
Holy frickin shit. Ted Rall’s head is going to explode.
Paul L.
So using the standard of the commenters here that saying that Auschwitz was worst then Buchenwald, I can conclude that you guy agree with Al Sharpton on this.
Dickhead Sharpton Defending Despicable Lowdown Criminals – Guess Why?
I expect this retort from Krista
AND IF YOU BELIEVE THE RAPES ARE NOT THE SAME, YOU ARE A RACIST RAPE APOLOGIST!!!.
4tehlulz
0/10
TenguPhule
Shorter Paul L: Look! A jackalope!
Killjoy
Damn, I was expecting the Ward Churchill equivalency clause, not the Al Sharpton eject button. Foiled again!
Tsulagi
And a very good one it was.
However, apparently our brave and valiant countertop warriors came back for more. You can see a brief email exchange on the bitchslap-ee’s site. Small and pathetic is far too grandiose to describe these assholes.
To answer claims from these assholes Obama was lying, and that Buchenwald/Ohrdruf was merely a camp for those living the Arbeit Macht Frei good life, Mr. Kitchell has added this to his site honoring the 89th…
Some old soldiers really make you proud. Some who benefited from their service, not so much.
Andrew
Paul L., I don’t think being objectively pro-certain-kinds-of-rape is really helping your case here.
El Cid
Saddam Hussein killed perhaps as many of his own people as Reagan’s close friends the evangelical genocidalist military leaders of Guatemala, who had a much, much smaller population to deal with.
Therefore, what Saddam did was not really that serious given the actual genocide going on in Guatemala, you know, proportionally and all.
Krista
Oh honey, you don’t know me at all, do you? I don’t think I’ve ever given an all-caps reply. I’m really not one for shouting, you know.
Besides, you completely missed my point. Using your Sharpton story as an example, it would be akin to you saying to the Boca Raton girls that there were “merely” raped while drunk, ignoring the larger picture that it is horrible that anybody gets raped.
So, with regards to this whole Auschwitz thing, when people say, “merely a work camp” when referring to Buchenwald, they are minimizing the very real horror that was experienced by those who were there.
Can you understand that?
catatonia
Hitler’s two-tier system for implementing the Final Solution (bad: Auschwitz; notsobad: Buchenwald) would, some 60+ years in the future, give America-haters like Raymond Kitchell a talking point to try and squelch honest criticism of muslimfag Obama.
Darkness
Wasn’t Bush I twice the only survivor of the group he led into action? That always stuck with me, trying to imagine the thoughts of the guys assigned to him subsequently. Even the NRO addresses some of this. Surprise, surprise.
Bush I’s prior military service, in theater, certainly paid off for all of us. Invade Iraq: 600,000 troops. Occupy country? not enough troops. If there was anything he needed to be paid back for, watching his son the last eight years would cover a lot.
And it was he, not Clinton as the wingnuts assert, who changed the plan for the standing military, doing away with the two theaters of operations preparedness plan. It seemed like a good idea at the time, I’m sure, given that the military was not supposed to ever be used as a police force again, post-vietnam.
AW
Dude, how about a warning before showing those kinds of pictures?
I was eating lunch. Now I’m not sure I can keep it down.
Jon H
I’d be happier if he added “violate the Constitution, or that I feel violate American norms of ethics and morality”.
Or something to that effect. Because I’m sure Bush has signed a lot of executive orders that aren’t unconstitutional, but are merely shitty.
Cain
The fool didn’t realize that by going after him he was pretty much going after the entire 89th division by trivializing their service and their experience. I think they looking to bite off more than they can chew.
I hope they continue to pursue it, because once the condemnation starts rolling in from all corners, they’ll be trivialized as they should be. They call themselves fucking patriots? Fuck them and their partisan hackery. /rage
cain
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
Don’t you have a White Power rally or David Irving booksigning to attend?
jcricket
This is the combination of three things:
1) The defensive posture necessitated by 28% support and falling
2) The echo-chamberish nature of the blogosphere, especially on the right-wing.
3) Republicans are especially beholden to their grass-root nutjobs (they are in a position of power), economic (Norquist), religious (Dobson, Hagee) and otherwise (Riehl, Malkin, Coulter, Limbaugh).
So I’m fine with all the wingers clustering in one-place and getting all dusted up about everything. The more “pure” they try and make the party the better it is for all of us.
Anticorium
Please, Paul. Quibble over the numbers more. It truly covers you in glory, and puts you in esteemed company.
r€nato
…but I’m going to do it anyway…
Well, then. It’s almost like it never happened! Break out the Purple Heart band-aids, boys! We’ve got another veteran to smear!
Darkness
Oh, then bitchslap Bill Clinton around for not having done the same thing post-ReaganBush. Ah, I feel better already just imagining it.
I remember the pain of realizing in Clinton’s first year that the right had been correct… he did need to be loved by everyone…. aaarrg. Okay, okay, focus on the bitchslap… aaaaah.
El Cid
It’s a wingnut conundrum! If you’re only in a fighting war for a few months, it doesn’t count! But if you’re in one for years and years and you survive, it must not have been that bad!
Therefore, it only counts if you’re in the war for years and years and you’re killed several times over!
A Different JC
When do most of us get the little warning light in our brains to tell us that we’re entering into Terrible Territory? When you find yourself diminishing the Holocaust, that light should be blinking, a siren should be blowing, and if you have a friend he/she should be nudging you in the ribs saying “dude, stop, you just said Hitler wasn’t as bad as Obama”
4tehlulz
Because most of us aren’t crypto-fascists?
A Different JC
Or neo-nazis. Which I think we can call anybody who tries to say that Buchenwald wasn’t all that bad.
CWD
I guess if Ohrdruf is “merely” a slave labor camp and wasn’t as bad as an extermination camp because it lacked ovens and gas chambers then the Khmer Rouge weren’t so bad either. After all the killing fields didn’t have cremetoria or gas chambers either. They did you with a metal pipe and a knife! Old school.
Boy, the shennanigans those young idealist scallywags will get up to during a war sure are a hoot! Fratboys blowing off steam!
jcricket
My grandfather, who volunteered for service in WWII stormed the beaches at Normandy, and served for years as a medic, would be rolling over in his grave right about now. Because of course being “just a medic” you don’t usually kill enemies, so I’m sure it wasn’t all that “bad for him”. And really, he only served a couple of years, so that’s nothing compared to the wingers, who are always fighting a war somewhere.
Perhaps I should go ask my dad, who volunteered for service in Vietnam, if it was like a picnic with the unfortunate odor of chemicals? Or my great-grandfather (also volunteered) about how WWI was really like a a vacation to Monaco with George Clooney, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
I will admit that none of my relatives had sentient robots trying to swarm them with their tentacles, so how can he compare to the hell that is the Matrix, where the wingers are clearly fighting for humanity.
Not a week goes by that the right wing doesn’t do something to parody itself beyond the previously attained depth of absurdity they established just the week before.
OriGuy
You’d be in good company. Patton lost his lunch after visiting Ohrdruf.
jcricket
Right – lots of poor hungry people die working in the fields every day. How do we know all those millions weren’t gonna die no matter what Pol Pot did. In fact, what kind of name for a dictator is Pol Pot? Sounds made up. Prolly didn’t exist.
LanceThruster
It gets worse. I heard FAUX propagandists on my Sirius Satellite radio saying that the whole thing was a web of lies. They went on to berate him for saying “uncle” when in fact they said it was his “great” uncle (like when I say cuz’n, I’m *always* very specific for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., so’s I knows who I kin be canoodlin’!)
They really are grasping at straws, aren’t they?
jcricket
I think we long ago passed the grasping at straws portion of the debate and are now squarely in the wild-eyed lunatic-fringe hallucinatory stage.
Fledermaus
Even if he did exist – he ran farms, probably organic ones. It’s a classic example of liberal facism!
A Different JC
We can safely say that with a name like Pot he was hippie. A liberal fascist, as it were. Alert the doughy pantload!
Kilkee
I want to thank the rightwing ‘tards for giving me a new perspective on my father’s WWII service. Yeah, sure, he was with the 9th Infantry Division from 1940 to 1945, and saw combat in North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium, and Germany (including fun stops like the St. Lo breakout, the Hurtegan Forest, the Remagen Bridge, and teh Battle of the Bulge), but he was in the 26th Field Artillery, so when I think about it, it wasn’t like he was really like right up in the faces of the Boche stabbin’ ’em in the neck with his bayonet or anything. Kind of sitting back like yards from the front, lobbing shells. Not such a big deal.
Sigh. All my heros, it seems, have feet of clay.
Luke
Mike Says:
Rand Simberg is a low-grade moron and has been for years.
No, he must’ve got himself a centrifuge, ’cause that there’s some weapons-grade moronium…
The Plot of Obama's Tangled Web of Lies Thickens: It Wasn't Even a Concentration Camp
[…] Obama claims Payne helped liberate a concentration camp. Only a gullible liberal would believe that. His uncle did nothing of the sort! […]
TenguPhule
Paul L, arguing that Death and Torture are measured only by numbers. After all it’s not like we killed and tortured as many people as the other guys, so what’s the problem?
Get the Fuck out of the Gene Pool.
flywheel
I was born and raised in a little town called Vitriol, Texas. Everywhere I have gone since that little town folded up has seemed, somehow, empty and hollow until I found Balloon Juice, uh, what state is this? Well, it feels like home, somehow.
Every where else that I moved, people were all trying to get along and put a nice face on it, you know? But I can tell that ain’t true here, and nobody seems to be particularly black and blue either. Ever since I left Vitriol, I have been missin’ it. It sure is good to be here.
over_educated
If you can’t have Vitriol toward holocaust deniers/apologists, who can you have vitriol for?
Chris Arndt
Geez, John Cole, some days you can be a dumbass.
May 28th was one of those days.
To contrast, your smart days you post just pictures of women volleyball players in bikinis.
But on May 28 you read a paragraph that condemns the human condition for building slave labor camps where people are worked to death, and then condemns the writer for insisting that such an incredibly evil thing was a different sort of phenomena than an extermination camp or a death camp.
You are a dumbass. At least on May 28.
What a dumbass.