Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 5:50:43 PM
I haven't done one of these in a while, but today I found that
Best of the Web once again was imitating my blog.
Yesterday they quoted a lengthy passage from The New Yorker about Obama, which inspired me to have a bit of a chuckle at Obama's tendency to make massive gaffes.
Well, today, they made a similar comment, though in a slightly different vein:
This is a bit embarrassing for us, but a lot more so for our counterparts over at The New Yorker. In an item yesterday on that magazine's cover story about Barack Obama, we failed to note a gross historical inaccuracy. The magazine quotes Obama as saying in 2002:
". . . 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. . . ."
In fact, Auschwitz was liberated not by Patton's army
but by Zhukov's: Like all of Poland, the death camp was taken by the
Soviets, not the Americans. As for Treblinka, also in Poland, it was
never liberated. In 1943, after a failed uprising, the Germans closed
Treblinka and forced the captives to destroy the facility.
Granted, the error here is Obama's, not The New
Yorker's, which presumably quoted the candidate accurately. Still, it's
hard to imagine the magazine quoting such a howler from, say, George W.
Bush without correcting him. So either the magazine is deliberately
withholding information harmful to its favored candidate or its
renowned fact-checking department is not as much of a powerhouse as it
used to be.
My comment can be found on my blog, but the relevant passage is this:
But what I had forgotten was that Obama apparently had a grandfather
serving in the Red Army. Either that or he, um, how shall we put this?
"Misspoke"? "Was too nuanced in his understanding"? "Suffered a memory
malfunction"?
How about Obama lied, and didn't even bother to create a convincing
lie. Just as events in Selma somehow brought together his parents 4
years after he was born, just as he was inspired by nonexistent
magazine articles, his grandfather talked to fellow soldiers in the Red
Army.
So, tell me again why political commentators are calling Bush an
"idiot" and treating this buffoon as the second coming? He has made not
only more mistakes, but even more idiotic mistakes than Bush ever did.
And worse still most of his mistakes were made in the course of lying
about something.
Where has the press been on this? Why has none of this ever been played
up? Not only has it not appeared A1 above the fold, as it would had
Bush done the same, it doesn't even appear B16 or D23, it is completely
dropped. But they continue to tell me the press is in no way biased.
I believe that as much as I do Grandpa Obama's war stories.
Well, I do admit our posts aren't all that similar, but it is still fun for me to pretend that I have scooped the WSJ, so just bear with me while I indulge in this bit of silliness.