Go ahead...just blame it on grandma, she won't mind.
Posted on 05/27/2008 2:40:55 PM PDT by milwguy
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. - Barack Obama's campaign says the candidate made a mistake when he said a great uncle helped liberate the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during World War II.
Obama said Monday that his uncle was among the first U.S. troops at Auschwitz. But Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces.
The campaign said Tuesday that he named the wrong camp. They said it was actually Buchenwald.
Aides said his grandmother's brother, Charlie Payne, helped liberate a Buchenwald sub-camp in April 1945 as part of the 89th Infantry Division.
Critics had been questioning Obama's original comment mentioning Auschwitz
A lot of people who went through that just wanted to forget and didn't talk about it.
If you were a relative of someone who'd been there, either as a prisoner or a liberator, you might have heard something and then put it together with what you already knew and got it wrong.
If you went to the time and trouble to find out all the facts, I suppose it would show a greater concern, but it's a personal choice. You might just not go in for family history.
HOW COULD OBAMA BE SO CARELESS AND INACCURATE ABOUT EVENTS OF SUCH ENORMOUS MORAL AND HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE?
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Exactly! Well said!
But it doesn’t matter; Obama would clearly make a better president than Bush because he is so much more articulate.
Maybe this is how Obama intends to add jobs to the US economy!
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You truly made me LOL!
You make excellent points.
I didn’t mean to undermine the historical importance, or negate the horror, of the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
I was thinking that in the context of this political battle, a more important story is the fact that McCain invited Obama to Iraq. I feared that the media might be covering up this potential check-mate by McCain.
Yes, Obama is stupid and uncaring and hopefully he will lose support because of this.
good points - Obama is trying to make it sound like he had another “crazy uncle in the attic” to go along with the more recent adopted Uncle Reverend Wright - but he managed to write his memoir without even bothering to learn the elementary facts about his great-uncle’s service in WWII. That speaks to really poor research skills as well as a lack of interest in the period and in his family members..... but maybe he just wasn’t interested in “typical white persons” on his mother’s side. All I hear about is the family of the Kenyan father who abandoned him, and very little about the side of the family that actually raised him and cared for him. Guess his great-uncle was just another useless cracker until the concentration camp liberation story became politically useful.
This isn’t correcting a couple of errors, this is making up a totally new story. Thus, I feel confident the whole this is totally made up. Obama is telling tall tales to try to appeal to the jewish vote.
“If you were a relative of someone who’d been there, either as a prisoner or a liberator, you might have heard something and then put it together with what you already knew and got it wrong.”
I understand that part.
What I don’t understand is how a presidential candidate doesn’t know the fact that the Russians liberated Auschwitz.
If you went to the time and trouble to find out all the facts, I suppose it would show a greater concern, but it’s a personal choice. You might just not go in for family history.
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True, but if you are going to drag your dead uncle out to score political points, you should at least try to get your facts straight.
And, as Enchante has much more eloquently asked, should we not expect someone who wants to lead this nation to have a better grasp of history and of the moral significance of WWII?
All individual U.S. Army records for WW2 destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1973. Even if they were available you would need to get them under the FOI Act, and support your the the oldest living retaliative. If his DD214 is available at city hall, in a city where he applied for a veterans tax credit, it probably would not state his exact location. The size of a WW2 division was 17,000, if someone can give me his MI and I can search, as anyone can, his enlistment record on the National Archives website. There 2 pages of Charlie Payne. This will prove or disprove he was in the army, his color, his education and age.
Go ahead...just blame it on grandma, she won't mind.
Yes, what I find most frightening is that Obama clearly has only the faintest idea of the circumstances and details of WWII. If he knew anything at all then he would at least have realized in advance that he didn’t know what he was talking about! (this started at least as early as 2002, that we know about)......
If he even had a vague of idea of the movement of armies and the locations of some of the major concentration camps then he would KNOW that he had to be careful in making a specific assertion about his “uncle” (great-uncle) being involved in the liberation of Auschwitz. It’s not just that he’s clueless on family history (thought admittedly the family lore that is passed down word-of-mouth can itself be inaccurate), but he is completely ignorant of the basic facts of WWII and the Holocaust.
Otherwise, a little voice would have said “wait a minute, was it really Auschwitz when that was way over in eastern Poland, in the Soviet zone of conquest” - the fact that he repeated two different (but completely inaccurate) versions in 2002 and 2008 makes me think he is ignorant and careless not merely about his own family but about some of the biggest events in modern US, European, and world history.
Do not doubt that if any Republican were screwing it up like O-Gaffa they would be driven from the field forever. Just think of the smear campaign aimed at Dan Quayle over an ‘e’ on the end of ‘potato’....
“Obama had nothing to do with liberating anything.”
I have to disagree. He has worked hard at liberating the taxpayers’ money from them.
Okay. Good point.
I was thinking more about all the things we don't know about family history, the stories that we hear that we never bothered to check out.
But the knowledge of big picture history should have prevented a candidate from making a mistake like that.
hah!
Like Rush said today—if McCain had made even one of these gaffes, he would have been driven out of the campaign.
I would imagine he was from kansas as that is where Obama’s grand mother was from. His grandmother was born in Augusta Kansas so that would be a good place to start looking for Charlie Payne
here is info I have on Charlie Payne, August a Kansas
Payne, Charles E. Inducted 9 June 1943, Army 37531353 Registered, order # V11125 Augusta, Butler Co. (Board # 2)
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