Apparently, over the week-end, Obama errantly said that is Great Uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz, when he actually liberated Buchenvald:
Obama’s campaign clarified the comments about the candidate’s great-uncle liberating Auschwitz, saying Obama was “mistaken,” and was referring to Buchenwald, not Auschwitz. “Senator Obama’s family is proud of the service of his grandfather and uncles in World War II – especially the fact that his great uncle was a part of liberating one of the concentration camps at Buchenwald,” said spokesman Bill Burton.
This, of course, sent the fact-checkers in the right wing blogosphere into hyper-drive– “Obama rewrites history” stated one, “Dumber than Bush, Dumber than Quayle,” stated another! It is true- this lack of vetting of great uncle’s stories of their military history is a serious, serious lack of judgment, and who knows what kind of mayhem it could lead to were Obama to become President.
Why, he may not know the difference between Shia and Sunni.
He may actually go to Arizona to celebrate a birthday when New Orleans is flooding.
He may invade the wrong country after terrorists attack us.
Who knows what kind of mayhem this appalling lack of judgment might lead to?
*** Update ***
I really can not tell you how silly these guys look making this line of attack. You really need to click the memorandum link above and check out the reactions. After eight years of fellating the guy who was so dumb his press conferences should have come with a laugh track, they are now really trying to claim Obama is stupid.
over_educated
I honestly hope the republicans keep pushing this. Linking Obama to his heroic, anti-nazi forbearers seems like a poor attack strategy.
libarbarian
OMG THE MAGICAL HOLOCAUST PONY WANTS TO THROW ISRAEL UNDER THE BUS
jibeaux frmrly Jen
C’mon, John, you just know the publishing companies are excitedly rubbing their hands over the 2009 Calendar of Obama Gaffes-a-Day!
Dennis - SGMM
Cue Terry McAuliffe and Lanny Davis stating that this disqualifies Obama to be president in three…two…
Sleeper
TalkLeft, of course, feels that this totally shows how Obama’s campaign is hopeless. Because his campaign is totally based on his biography, don’t you know. And the Republicans are going to eviscerate Obama based on confusing concentration camps from WWII, so the superdelegates should just crown Clinton and get it over with. Or words to that effect.
cleek
meh. it was a small gaffe on Obama’s part. he fixed it.
if the Cheetoids want to show off how much they’ve learned from watching the Hitler Channel, i guess that’s their right. and they might as well enjoy it now – they’re gonna get their asses handed to them in Nov.
D.N. Nation
1) Also, keep in mind that a bunch of wingnuts (see: Ambrose, Jay) have attempted to paint McCain’s al-Qaeda-is-in-Iran as a one-off misstatement…which is verifiably false. So these clowns themselves are either lying or stupid.
2) As dubious and pointless as it was, at least the wingnuts were geting a little traction with Jeremiah Wright. This whole new “LOL HES STOOPID!” line, coming from the same crew who carried President Is Our Children Learning’s water for 8 years, is a ridiculous swing-and-a-miss. But keep trying, Glenn Reynolds, et al.
montysano
These manly warbloggers may want to consider toning down their attacks on the MUP. Once Supreme Ayatollah Hussein Obama X initiates the Gangsta Caliphate, he may have …. plans for their pasty asses.
attaturk
These same clowns attacking Obama on mixing up death camps and trying to make hay by using the Holocaust (classy, no?) are the same goobers who defending the Chimp-in-Chief even though, according to McClellan the guy claimed not to remember whether he ever did cocaine.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052703679_pf.html
Carl
The boyz and girlz over at No Quarter see this as rising to the level of HRC’s Bosnia embellishments . . . They are starting to make the Townhall clowns seem reasonable.
Jinchi
“Dumber than Bush, Dumber than Quayle,”
Wait, when did the right wing start conceding that these guys are idiots?
Scotty
Has anyone actually addressed the reason he brought it up in the first place. PTSD?
Or is that not important?
Punchy
Clearly, by Obama invoking Goodwin’s Law in his speech, means Obam/sa is a Nazi himself. AND HE’S BLACK, TOO! BOOOOOOOOOO!!
Crusty Dem
These same clowns attacking Obama on mixing up death camps and trying to make hay by using the Holocaust (classy, no?) are the same goobers who defending the Chimp-in-Chief even though, according to McClellan the guy claimed not to remember whether he ever did cocaine.
Well, as Rick James once said, cocaine is a hell of a drug..
mere mortal
From Reuters
So, not his uncle, and not Auschwitz, eh? So, this begs the question, was his uncle under sniper fire when this was happening?
I completely agree.
However, it’s strange that you didn’t think such an attack was so silly when Clinton was making a miscue. Then it was a serious blunder, a glimpse into a flawed soul who would say anything to become president. It’s almost as if there were a double standard, one for the goring your ox, and one for the other fellow’s.
What I’m trying to suggest here is that you may have no dry powder for this engagement.
4tehlulz
OT: Dunkin Donuts caves to Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage
Punchy
I just stepped into TL for a moment, left a comment, and holy shit, I really dont know what’s worse — TL or RudeState. I cannot believe these peeps are actually Dems, with their vitriol, disconnection from reality, and just pure hatred and disdain.
Think about that for a second. Seriously.
4tehlulz
I imagine there might have been sniper fire around Buchenwald.
Dulcie
*sigh* I hate these people. It’s not like family stories are always handed down 100% correctly. The difference between Auschwitz and Buchenwald is so minor, it’s not even worth calling a gaffe.
Mary
He was recounting a family story and said uncle instead of great uncle, and Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald . This isn’t the same as claiming, on more than one occasion, to have been personally under sniper fire (after failing to paint the same picture in in memoirs), and also failing to retract those statements for days after people questioned it.
She repeatedly made the same claim and didn’t walk it back until she had no choice. Not a valid comparison at all.
Josh
Right, and while Obama’s great-uncle was helping free Jews from Buchenwald, Dubya’s grandfather was having his assets seized by the feds for their investment in the Nazi war machine. But of course they’re more patriotic than us.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
Yeah, there’s no difference between attempting to recall second-hand stories told by a family member of events sixty plus years back and attempting to recall your own allegedly harrowing experiences only a decade or so previous. Nope, not at all.
over_educated
Some of the right wing blogs are now claiming that Buchenwald wasn’t a real concentration camp, but rather a “forced labor” camp.
I like how the implication here is that Auschwitz is WAY better than lame-ass Buchenwald. Like, you want to see some real human depravity, you had to go to Auschwitz. They were some pansy-ass mass murderers over in Buchenwald.
Dulcie
It was his great-uncle, and it was Buchenwald, not Auschwitz. Try again.
4tehlulz
The funny thing is, one of the destinations for those forcebly marched from Aushwitz-Birkenau to Germany as the Red Army approached was….wait for it….Buchenwald.
SnarkyShark
Bob In Pacifica
Nice to see you here man. Glad to see you made it out alive from the lunatic asylum over at TLC.
The difference is most Americans can easily imagine themselves confusing Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Or sunshine and sunrise.
That can’t really imagine being confused about being under fire from snipers or not.
The fact that Obama has been aboveboard and your candidate has been a lying cheating weasel negates your ridicules claim.
Get back to us when your crush owns up to having signed that pledge about MI/FL.
Man I am listening to The Young Turks on podcast and Cenk is going off. No bullshit at all. He calls her out as a cheat and liar.
Lets get real. Thats what we are talking about here.
D-Chance.
“My dad was a star quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers!”
“OK, so it was my dad’s second cousin who was an equipment manager for the Pittsburgh Colts…”
Change = same old, same old.
jibeaux frmrly Jen
It was his uncle. The error was in the name/location of the concentration camp. He said one, and it was actually another. He wasn’t actually there, you understand, not having been born and all. This is the beginning and end of the mistake.
Now, which “miscue” are you talking about? The one where Hillary said that she, herself, personally, had been under sniper fire, when in reality, she, herself, personally, had actually not been under sniper fire? Does this really seem like the same kind of mistake to you?
Our neighborhood pool just opened up. A lot of those people I haven’t seen in a year. I called a woman’s son Hudson when his name is actually Hunter. I did not misremember my trip to the grocery store last week as one in I was on my way to the grocery store when I was in a wreck, totalling my car. Does that distinction make any sense to you?
4tehlulz
Holocaust deniers to the last. Buchenwald actually is where the human-skin lampshades were found.
jibeaux frmrly Jen
D-Chance, can I just say in the spirit of constructive criticism that you really fail at trolling? You’re garden variety dumb instead of outrageous, your snark sucks, and you don’t use caps and misspelling for emphasis. You are a boring troll, which is kind of like being a dyspeptic cheerleader.
nightjar
This to me is about the ugliest part of this whole mess. The Talklefters and their companion blogs have co-opted the voices of the wingnuts in just about every way imaginable way — the same people they have railed against for years are now comrades in arms for Hillary. It’s going to be one hell of a hangover, the day they wake up and look at themselves in the mirror. I just hope and pray I never get so far in the tank of self-delusion for ANY candidate.
over_educated
LOL. do you really think anybody is fooled by that lame-ass analogy?
Sarcastro
“We should make sure that today’s veterans get the same benefit that my grandfather got when he came back from World War II,” Obama said. “It was a good investment not only for him, but it was a good investment for the country, built our middle class. So we’re going to make sure that that gets passed.”
It lead directly to the creation of a well educated Baby Boomer generation that then proceeded to use that education to end a war, integrate the races and expand the power of the lower and middle classes.
The right will fight this tooth and nail because they don’t want to see that shit ever again.
TheFountainHead
So creating an event out of thin air that didn’t happen in which whizzing bullets were fantasized into existence is the same as not knowing the right concentration camp his great Uncle was at in WWII?
/facedesk
Davebo
No thanks, I’m dealing with a large corporate IT department today so I’ve already reached my quota of teh stupid.
syl
Clinton made up a story about events that didn’t happen. Obama incorrectly recounted events that did happen.
Watch:
True Story: “Frank and Bob went to a baseball game in Chicago while wearing green shirts.”
Later on, Frank tells this version: “Bob and I went to a baseball game in Chicago last week and we wore red shirts.”
Bob tells this version: “Frank and I diffused a bomb at an elementary school in Chicago last week, saving hundreds of children.”
joe
Hillary invented details that she claimed to remember happening to her personally. Then, when she got caught, she tried to make up another story on the spot, inventing additional details about what, allegedly, happened to her personally.
When the Tuzla story first broke, I actually was inclined to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt. I figured that she had confused to events in her memory, which happens a lot. But that’s not what happened.
jibeaux frmrly Jen
I would also like to add, could the news day possibly be any slower that this is a topic of discussion? If something doesn’t happen tomorrow, the pundits are going to be talking about my calling that kid Hudson.
PeterJ
Someone really should do with TL what they did with His44.
How many of the posters that posted there a year ago are still there?
How many of those writing all that hate were members a year ago?
And so on.
I would really like to know their troll/honest poster ratio…
jake
ZOMG HES THROWING HIS WHITE DEAD GREAT UNCLE UNDER THE BUS!
Wait … liberating a concentration camp is a good thing?
Never mind.
And this, boys and girls, is why the biggest threat to the fRight Wing is … the fRight Wing.
Sit back and let them get on with it yet another gut-knotting display of ignorance and callousness. As I type, I’m sure some Frightened Keyboardist is gathering Barbie dolls and shoe boxes to show that prisoners in Buchenwald had 1.3″ more space per cell than the people at Auschwitz.
Lee
I know this sounds crazy, but do you think he did this in order to make his critics sound stupid?
I know it’s typically not hard to make the wingnuts sound stupid, but it sure would be a clever way to start to innoculate yourself from their critcism.
empty
On Obama’s miscue we have one post from Jeralyn blaming it on his campaign trying to build a narrative. On Clinton’s miscue we have John having multiple orgasms for days on end. Compare and contrast.
Rick Taylor
I almost wonder if Obama made the gaffe on purpose. I wouldn’t even have heard the story if it weren’t for the controversy over it. Obama made a gaffe. It was his great uncle WHO HELPED LIBERATE THE CONCENTRATION CAMP BUCHEN WALD, it wasn’t Auschwitz at all. He’s terribly sorry if this mislead anyone. I’m happy if this lodges the historical tidbit in peoples’ minds.
Dreggas
Will we get to change “WEST SIIIIDE” to “WEST WIIING”?
4tehlulz
Well, we already know what their countertops were made from.
libarbarian
Yes, because Buchenwald was just the Pitsburgh Colts of the Holocaust. Aushwitz was rough but Buchenwald…..fucking club med of the Shoah.
jibeaux frmrly Jen
I have a better idea. Why don’t you “compare and contrast” the “miscues”?
over_educated
Again:
Getting a historical fact slightly wrong does not equate with completely making a bunch of crap up that you claim you yourself participated in.
Napoleon
I actually had an uncle I was always told also helped free a “concentration” camp (and also was in the detail that arrested Goering). Does anyone really think someone in that position of having to see the horrible things that had gone on there make that type of distinction?
RSA
That memeorandum link is pretty funny–everyone’s now a goddamned WWII historian and geography expert. This understated bit is my favorite:
Of course. Saying “Obama confused Buchenwald and Auschwitz!” doesn’t have much of an impact unless you explain to your readers why they should be outraged. I doubt the average American can even spell those place names, much less know where they were.
Lee
Rick Taylor,
Great minds think alike :)
libarbarian
My grandmother was an Army nurse during WWII whose unit was brought in to tend to the survivors of a concentration camp.
I can’t remember which one.
I can imagine making a mistake as to which one it was. I cant imagine ever mistaking being under sniper fire.
4tehlulz
I’d love to see one of these fuckers go to a survivor of Buchenwald and claim it was merely a forced labor camp. We could find out if it is physically possible to insert an entire walker into a Holocaust denier’s ass.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
Why bother when you can just get a cheap shot in at the Democratic nominee? Those McCain brownie points won’t earn themselves!
Dreggas
My reading of the history of the concentration camps is that the only difference between them, and what went on in them were their names. That Clintards could sink to Malkinian levels of craven stupidity over this just proves how pathetic they have become.
cleek
Wiki says:
so. umm. no.
Perry Como
Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets, so this is just more proof that Barack HUSSEIN O
sbama is a stealth Muslim, Manchurian candidate, extremist BLACK Christian, Communist.jake
Heh. And I was willing to settle for frog marching them all to the Holocaust Museum and locking them in for a week.
I’m sure the Brown Squirt blogs will suddenly be filled with people who know survivors and people related to people who liberated concentration camps and they’ll all have some nugget of wisdom that proves Obama is a liar and an anti-Semite!1 The rest will just have to settle for researching his great-uncle’s military record.
Breschau
This is, without a doubt, the funniest Right Wing meme of all time.
8 years of George W. Bush as your figurehead, and the tact you go with is “Obama is STOOPID”? Really?
George W. Bush?
This George W. Bush?
There’s only one thing about this that gives me pause – somehow, 4 years ago, they managed to convince people that a draft dodger was a greater patriot than a Purple Heart awarded Vietname Veteran.
Napoleon
. . . and countertops.
tBone
You forgot “elitist” and “shitty bowler.”
Tsulagi
Plus that stealth commoislamofascist candidate is an overt yankee northerner. Bastard would probably burn the Confederate flag.
Maggie
It’s stuff like this that makes you want to buy Intrade’s Obama-Pres contract. The reaction just reeks of desperation, doesn’t it?
And the Republicans are right to be desperate. Obama is at his low point relative to McCain right now, and still looks like the better bet to win in November. It only gets better from here. Moreover, the Republicans don’t seem to have anything in their playbook besides “he’s a scary radical liberal, possibly muslim, black guy”. They assume that will work for them. But what they are missing is that when the Republican brand went into disrepute, so did the Republican lines of attack. It’s a lot like the mistake Democrats made about Reagan. Reagan was way too conservative, in a time when conservative was still mostly a dirty word. But the Democrats were in disrepute, and those lines of attack stopped working.
The polls are going to zig up and down between now and November. But I think the final result (barring sea-changing event) is quite predictable. Obama probably doesn’t get the Reagan-style landslide because race does cost him some. But he wins comfortably. Bet on it.
Josh
Eeeewwww. Thank you for putting both the image of Hillary and the concept of ‘orgasm’ in my brain at the same time. If there’s any left of that bleach that’s been goin’ around I think I’ll drink it now.
Jeff
I also want to know who doesn’t call their great-uncle, “Uncle”. He’d be called elitist if he said his great-uncle was at Buchenwald. What about his not-so-great-uncle.
P.S. My grandfather was in a concentration camp, and I do not even know which one. I am not proud of that fact, but let’s have a little perspective.
empty
Promises, promises.
patroclus
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as 56,000 others, died at Buchenwald. Leon Blum, Georges Mandel and even Anne Frank were at Buchenwald. It was one of the most notorious death camps in Germany. I humbly suggest that the right-wing smear machine actually research Buchenwald before treating it as some pansy-assed Club Med.
Original Lee
My friend’s father always refers to his tattoo as his “receipt from Hotel Auschwitz”. I asked him last night if he cared that Obama got the camps mixed up, and he said that he doubted anyone who survived one of those camps would be upset, because who complains about which zip code your Get Out of Hell Free card was mailed from? He said he would only have been upset if it turned out Obama didn’t have any relatives at all involved in liberating people from the camps.
oh really
Yesterday I followed a link to No Quarter. What I found was truly amazing. I thought I’d entered RedState.com from some parallel universe’s back door. I don’t waste my time on sites where the crazed fringe of one side or the other spends all their time accusing the “enemy” of being worse than Attila the Hun. Needless to say, my stay at No Quarter was quite short.
It’s one thing to prefer one candidate over the other; it’s something else entirely to simply ignore reality and start hurling a constant barrage of accusations, always 50 decibels above the threshold of pain. Larry Johnson and his friends have created an ugly monster.
I have no doubt that many of Larry’s pals will vote for McCain in November in the mistaken belief that a McCain victory will prove Clinton right after all — she really was more electable than Obama. However, all they will accomplish is to help deliver this country into the hands of McCain and Clinton will bear vastly more responsibility for the resulting disaster than Nader ever did for 2000.
Glocksman
The distinction between Auschwitz and Buchenwald is this.
Auschwitz II (it was part of a larger forced labor camp) was deliberately set up as an extermination camp that immediately gassed those who were unfit for forced labor as they arrived and gassed the laborers once they became too weak to work.
Buchenwald was set up as a concentration camp from the beginning but it wasn’t a purpose built extermination camp like Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor, etc.
The RW bloggers doing are even more disingenuous than Bill Clinton was aruging over the definition of ‘is’.
w vincentz
I’m confused. What was a Muslim uncle doing in a place like Buckenwald. I thought they sent Jewish people there.
And how come this is called a gaffe when it’s really a gaffette?
Andrew
The only thing more pathetic than TalkLeft is people who try to defend TalkLeft’s descent into idiocy.
Brachiator
The difference, of course, is that Senator Clinton’s statement was not a “miscue.” It was a deliberate lie mentioned numerous times in an attempt to create the false impression that Clinton had accumulated some kind of special experience or accomplishment that “qualified” her to be president, besides sleeping in the White House and having conversations with Bill now and again. And of course, Hillary had a surrogate appear before reporters and angrily wave “proof” of Clinton having been under sniper fire, until somebody showed up with video evidence exploding her lie.
And even here, Hillary ran for cover, having Bill run out another lie that the “miscue” only happened once, and she was tired from taking all those 3 am phone calls, etc.
So, Obama got some details of family history wrong. Hillary deliberately lied about something that never happened to her, deliberately smeared the comedian Sinbad, who was part of the travel group with Senator Clinton and who directly contradicted her lies, deliberately sent out surrogates to try to bolster her lie, only retracted her lie when confronted with direct video evidence, and then tried to weasel out of her lie by claiming that she was just tired and “misspoke.”
bago
You forgot atheist. too.
Calouste
All those people who are bleating on about the distinction between Auchwitz and Buchenwald should actually visit either of those sites.
And look at the pictures of the people who were turned into living skeletons.
And look at the piles of hair that the Nazis harvested from their victims.
And look at the painstaking recordkeeping of the death machine.
And look at the ovens and the gas chambers.
And look at the 6′ by 6′ cells into which they force dozens of people through a 2′ by 1′ opening at floor level to stand up throughout the night and die from exhaustion and suffaction, or “luckily” survive wedged in between dead bodies only to be shot in the morning.
Nim, ham hock of liberty
Was waiting for someone to mention that too.
Every living great-uncle of mine was always called “Uncle.” Uncle Pete, Uncle Jack, etc.
That Obama does this too is somehow proof of his unfitness for President is – literally, quite fucking insane.
kind of an off white
Mike O’Donoghue is smiling down upon you from Heaven.
This, I’ll never understand. She’s cautious to the point of uselessness as a legislator, and she’s a wretched campaigner, but she’s a great-looking lady. Hell, the only women her age who’ve held up better are the ones who get paid to be on camera.
And when she was young? Holy smokes, whadda fox. That’s why I always had so much empathy for Chelsea–I too know the pain of taking after the wrong parent. Then Chelsea hit escape velocity out her awkward stage, and I’m still a fucking garden gnome with a 6’4″ dad, so the empathy kinda waned.
Sasha
And granite countertops.
Sleeper
Ha! For trying to point out that this is a non-story, Jeralyn has labelled me a “chatterer” and started deleting my comments. hee hee. I feel almost honored.
maxbaer (not the original)
Yeah RSA, that’s what struck me, too.
“Well everyone knows that Auschwitz was in Poland and was liberted by the Red Army.”
It reminds me of those man on the street interviews that Leno used to do showing that the average person doesn’t know dick about anything.
The Other Steve
My Uncle Ken landed at Normandy.
Technically he was my mom’s uncle, not mine, but we called him Uncle Ken.
I don’t know where Uncle Ken landed, I think it was Utah Beach. He was just regular Army, not with the airborne or rangers or anything. Their batallion ended up going inland, and I’m not sure where after that. Probably fought in the bulge, but I don’t recall any stories of his group making it into Germany.
Ken never talked about the war. Nobody in the family knew much about what he did until a month before he died, he gave a cigar box with his medals and papers to my mom. He didn’t have any children, and my mother is the family historian.
His brother, who I never met and forget his name, drank himself to death. He fought in the Pacific theatre and saw much worse from what I’ve been told.
From talking to others, the unwillingness to talk about the war was pretty common amongst WWII vets. The stories we heard in the family all came second hand so it’s difficult to know exactly what they did.
But don’t call that PTSD, because that would be admitting weakness.
Tom in Texas
Oh man, you want to see hilarious. Here’s a few WWII vets smacking down the internet trooth brigade:
More hilarious responses from these veterans who Gilbert describes as having the politics of Cindy Sheehan:
Of course, there’s no way to prove that this CT Payne is the same Charles Payne Obama speaks of. Obama needs to provide the name, date of birth, and serial numbers of his relatives immediately.
dj spellchecka
Ronald Reagan, for example, boasted that he’d served in an Army unit that filmed recently liberated death camps. In reality, Reagan never left the U.S. during the war. Later, Reagan claimed to have seen secret military film of Nazi atrocities, though the film didn’t actually exist.
Jeff
The sad part is that the ChickenHawks are now questioning the WWII vets patriotism. The comments on Tom in Texas’ link are just depressing.
Rick Taylor
Look, I really disagree with anyone who minimizes Obama’s gaffe. Any Republicans out there who want to pounce on this and make political hay, go right ahead; all’s fair in politics. Yes, he made a monumental blunder saying his uncle liberated Auschwitz when actually it was HIS GREAT UNCLE WHO HELPED LIBERATE THE CONCENTRATION CAMP BUCHEN WALD. Obama opened himself up for attack, so please feel free to repeat the talking point as often as you like that Obama got it horribly wrong, it was actually HIS GREAT UNCLE WHO HELPED LIBERATE THE CONCENTRATION CAMP BUCHEN WALD. We’ll just have to live with it.
wobbly
Sorry, Balloon Juice, but Obama was just straight out stupid on this one.
And cheap.
Anyone, even a f**king gentile, with even a cursory interest in the hugest genocide in human history KNOWS where Auschwitz was and is.
ws
kind of an off white
Yeah, Wobbly, because those plaques that read “NEVER AGAIN” refer to failing Geography.
Cast aspersions on MY never-getting-the-blue-piece-in-Trivial-Pursuit ass, will ya…
nightjar
Either your a hilbot or wingnut wobbly and there doesn’t seem to be much difference these days, and I for one am glad to see Obama’s critics zeroing in like a laser on the important issues. Please keep a running list of Obama’s gaffes on split hairs, and shovel them daily down the gullets of the American voter. I am sure they will repay you and yours precisely what they are worth on election day.
Tom S
Anne Frank died at Belsen.
Whammer
It is amazing to see that people really are this stupid.
Did Obama benefit from the Buchenwald/Auschwitz mistake. Only in the Brer Rabbit sense that Rick Taylor has so masterfully identified. :-)
Was HRC trying to benefit by talking about sniper fire in Bosnia? Um, yes. Did that “mistake” undermine the story she was telling? Um, clearly.
This stuff really isn’t complicated. It is pretty amazing to see how anyone could even argue about any comparison here.
mere mortal
This is precisely what I’m talking about. To me, both mistakes are of the same sort. A candidate wants to express an idea, and uses a memory of personal or family experience to connect them to the idea.
Obama messed up details, but the idea was served, it’s no big deal at all. I maintained that in my comment.
Clinton, from what I understand from her Tuzla story, was flying in a military aircraft using a rapid descent with all passengers required to sit on flack jackets *because of the threat of sniper fire*. The idea she was trying to serve with her story was that her foreign visits weren’t all tea and shopping, the mistaken memory was between under sniper fire and under *threat* of sniper fire.
But, standard procedure, the comment above, and many more like it just in this thread, is used to characterize Clinton’s miscues, while another standard exists for Obama’s.
Obama supporters will get their share of such double standards in the general (and Democrats like me will get a second share), and will have to sell their own memories or sense of shame down the river if they complain about it then.
Call the other fellow’s candidate a liar, a bitch, or worse if you like (and many seem to like it very much), but it’s a strange way to unify a Democratic party. I am certainly persuaded by the threat of a McCain presidency (and have pulled the D lever in every presidential election since I was 18), but there are less dedicated Democrats whose revulsion to this sort of behavior will redound in a very unpleasant way.
Jane_in_Colorado
mere mortal… I’m sorry, but I don’t think the cases are comparable. Obama was talking about PTSD benefits, and noting that PTSD happened in WW2 as well as in later conflicts, and that a member of his own family suffered from it. In this sense, it doesn’t seem to me to be self-serving. Also, as soon as his error was pointed out, a correction was issued. As far as I know, the correction has not been refuted.
When I first read about Hillary’s Tuzla error, I thought she was probably conflating a memory of a time when she really did experience the threat of sniper fire with a time she didn’t. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. It would have been HUGE news if the First Lady had to run from sniper fire. Not to mention the First Daughter. We never heard that huge news because it never happened–not in Tuzla, and not anywhere else. (As a mother, my own reaction to such a situation would have been pure fury that my only child was put in such danger for political ends. I never understood why she didn’t sound that note.)
When Hillary’s story was questioned, her first reaction was to insist that it had happened just as she had said, that Sinbad’s response was unreliable because “he is a comedian”, and to bring out a staffer who sort of supported her story. Not until contemporary video accounts surfaced did she recant, and then pretty ungraciously. (She pretty much said, “So I’m human. So what?” Didn’t she?)
You may not see a difference here. I do.
jibeaux
You know, my mom used to tell me to look both ways before I crossed the street to make sure a car wasn’t going to hit me. I remember her telling me that. I did not revise that memory to be “once I was crossing the street and I was hit by a car.” If I were to have that memory, it would be because I was HIT BY A CAR.
jake
Les Awesomes. I nominate this as the standard reply to trolls.
In a way it sucks, especially since it no longer comes as a surprise. In a much larger way it is brilliant because it only serves to yet again show up the SUPPORT TEH TROOPS(TM) brigade for the brain dead hypocrites they are. If any of these shits come sniffing around Mr. Payne’s garbage cans … well, I’m sure they’ll understand if he or a caretaker uses his 2nd Am rights to defend his property.
Now it looks like some of the Reichtards want to cast doubt on whether Mr. Payne was at the liberation of Buchenwald. That’s how much of a humiliation fetish these dirt bags have and I admit I really like to watch. When it is confirmed that Yes, B. HUSSEIN Obama’s great-uncle really is an All American hero and once again they scurry back into the woodwork, I will need to smoke a a couple of post-orgasm cigarettes.
Rick Taylor
The pilot has denied these details.
Brachiator
Uh, no. Wolfson, Penn and the Clintons conspired to create a false persona for Hillary. They had to transform the totally meaningless, ceremonial role of First Lady (of Arkansas and the United States) into the lie that Hillary had somehow been co-governor and co-president, that she had helped negotiate treaties and that she regularly traveled to dangerous hot spots.
The idea was to fool people into believing that Hillary’s 30 years of being little more than an observer and a backseat driver to her husband’s running the government was some magical apprenticeship program that allowed her to meet a nonexistent commander-in-chief threshold.
Hillary participated in, and signed off on this deception. We know this because she made the Tuzla Deception part of her stump speech, trotting it out numerous times because she wrongly calculated that there was no dramatic tangible evidence that would contradict her lie. She figured that she could make Sinbad look like a chump with a simple dismissal: “Who are you going to believe? A Former First Lady or a Negro Comedian?”
But just like Bill and that blue dress, Hillary was undone by incontrovertible proof that she was a liar and a fraud.
Obama, on the other hand, is simply trying to counter the false impression that he is some kind of Muslim foreign agent. Challenging the details of his World War II anecdote does not in any way contradict the central truth that Obama’s story is part of America’s story.
There is a big difference between being prepared for any contingency (a stray attack on her aircraft) and dealing with a plausible threat. Hostilities had ended in Bosnia. Here is the Washington Post demolishing Hillary’s phony claims (Fact Checker):
In other words, even Clinton’s claims about Tuzla in her autobiography are at best distortions of the actual events.
I agree that this is an awesome response. The vast majority of the people who suffered through — or fought during — these terrible times have no interest in the simpleminded ideological games that wingnuts love to play.