Obama's Auschwitz Tale: Not the First Time
Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:52:31 pm PDT
Rand Simberg points out that Obama’s “Auschwitz” story is nothing new.
He was telling similar stories about his grandfather back in 2002, in his now-famous Iraq speech, which I’d never previously read:
My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.The first troops to enter those two camps (in Poland) were Soviet troops, so unless Patton was leading them, this can’t be true.As I noted in comments, you’d think that if he’s going to be telling these kinds of stories, he’d at least attempt to make them plausible (e.g., Dachau and Buchenwald). My guess is that he’s unfamiliar with the actual history of the war, and just invoked two of the most notorious camp names to make his point. Whether his grandfather (or “uncle”) actually told him tales of concentration camps will probably never be known.
