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. Yesterday he mistakenly referred to Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald in telling of his personal experience of a soldier in his family who served heroically...
Burton didn't address his uncles apparent mental instability, it's cause, or it's applicability to todays troops, but I'm sure he will. BTW, the uncle is apparently still alive. If he did suffer a breakdown, and I'd speculate that's BS, I'm sure he's pleased his nephew injected him in the campaign.
It will be most interesting to see whether his great-uncle chooses to say anything. Can’t imagine he’d want to get involved in discrediting O-Gaffa unless there is a really big rift, but Mr. Payne (?) could certainly settle whether or not he was a PTSD case who disappeared in the attic for 6 months after the war, whether there really was an attic, etc.
The real issues, though, in my view is simply that Obama has botched the telling of this tale, twice (2002 and 2008) in a way that indicates he neither knows nor cares anything about WWII and Holocaust history (never mind his own “typical white person” family history). This guy researched and published a memoir in which he goes into great detail about his Kenyan “family” of the father he never knew, yet he knows almost nothing of the actual heroic WWII history of the actual “white person” family represented by his mother. What does that say about him?