Posted on 06/07/2004 10:44:19 AM PDT by LincolnLover
In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
Is this true?
Hitchens is the best-spoken pickled brain I've ever read, but if you pay attention, he thinks all Americans are stupid even his fellow Democrat dung-beetle dumpster dwellers.
I haven't heard this charge before, but this looks like one of those out-of-context quotes like Hitchens' other one, that famous "missiles can be recalled" statement. Reagan was dead right on this one, actually. The context of his remark was a comparison of land-based ICBMs to submarine-launched missiles. In the latter case, the sub acts as a "first stage" of the delivery system. Up to the moment the missile is launched, the sub can be contacted and the launch canceled. This option does not exist with land-based missiles.
Homey, that's hilarious! Chill, my brutha.
Besides the fact that Ronald Reagan was an honest, ethical man not given to lying, it goes without saying, he wouldn't tell a huge whopper, easily disproven, to two separate men, on two separate occasions, and certainly not in the White House he so honored.
But wait! We've established neither Reagan nor Hitchens lie, that they are honest men, so how to explain this? Easy as pie with google.com.
Here's the straight skinny, at least as reported by "The Washington Monthly"...not a conservative publication!
"In November 1983, Reagan told visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. He repeated the story to Simon Wiesenthal the following February. Reagan never visited or filmed a concentration camp; he spent World War II in Hollywood, making training films with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps"
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.mendacity-index.html
It's so obvious to me that this was a simple misunderstanding, most likely a translation snafu, with no self-serving mischief, (on Reagan's part), involved at all. First of all, Reagan wasn't that kind of man, and there's no other occasion (I know of), where he bragged about, or invented accomplishments. And secondly, Reagan wasn't a photographer in his military unit. He acted in army training films, he produced them, and he was the unit's personnel officer.
I can imagine Reagan was looking to seek something in common with these two Jewish men, I can imagine he would have told them his unit was the one assigned to film the concentration camp atrocities, and I can see how easy it was for them to repeat that and have it twisted by those eager to mock President Reagan. Hitchens would have heard that mocking version of the truth and believed it to be true.
Case closed, for me, but how bout some interesting info?
Ronald Reagan - Captain, US Army Air Corps. Because of a severe hearing loss, he was not allowed any flying duties. However, he appeared in training films. Prior to the war, he was a cavalry officer in the Nebraska National Guard. but for Reagan's complete, and I mean COMPLETE military record, go here:
http://www.jodavidsmeyer.com/combat/military/actors_in_wwii.html
And for a wonderful history of "Hollywood's Army", (Reagan's unit), go here:
http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/wwii/rr.htm
Slate has some really good content from time to time. I find the Dispatches from Iraq and the occasional Kausfile (especially when Mickey, as an admitted Democrat, goes off on John Kerry) interesting. Oh, and the weekly Sopranos reviews are good, too.
please read my previous reply...I didn't see your question or I would have replied to you as well.
He is a lonely impotent drunk. Very sad indeed.
He didn't say that. I know he didn't. he probably said i was one of the first to see these horrible things on film, etc.
I want to see evidence not leftist crap.
Lets ask 'em. I'm sure their memories can remember something as eventful as meeting the President.
I think I screwed up the names. PR didn't write it someone else did.
It might be on the internet.
The whole point of the article is that the hard anti-American left lied about bomb tonnage it's impact, the areas in which were bombed(becaus eof military installions up the ying-yang by the way, along with that distorted quotes, fabricated quotes, etc.
Not exactly, ballistic missiles are also guided, but fly a ballistic trajectory.
Any object that is designed to move ordnance from one spot to another without a plane is "ballistic". I don't hink it matters if it's "guided".
He was also just about as blind as a bat.
The term ballistic missile was originally applied to missiles (like the V-2 and Minuteman-I) which were injected into a trajectory by controlling thrust cut-off and flight path angle. After thrust cut-off they flew ballistically. In missile parlance, the portion of the trajectory from thrust cut off to reentry is called the ballistic portion. In tracking radars, recognition of the thrust cut-off is important because the tracking filters use a different propagation model and process noise after thrust cut off. When thrust stops, the missile is said to "go ballistic", and that is the sense in which I was familiar with it for many years. Sometime around 1986, I remember waiting to enter a conference room behind two TRW software engineers who were discussing having told a particularly hot-tempered manager about a five-million dollar overrun. "It was about this time that Ray went ballistic." That was the first time I had heard the expression "go ballistic" used in this manner, although it soon passed into the vernacular.
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