Sen. Barack Obama opened his mouth on Memorial Day and promptly inserted his foot up to the kneecap. In a clear attempt to pander to his audience, Obama repeated a false story of how a relative freed death camp survivors during World War II.
"I had an uncle who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. The story in our family was that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn't leave the house for six months," stated Obama, during what was billed as an important speech on veterans.
The fact is that U.S. troops did not liberate Auschwitz, a camp located deep inside Poland. The Soviet Red Army liberated it.
While the mainstream media was willing to give Obama's gaffe a pass, it should be noted that just like Hillary, he has been repeating this same garbled statement over and over again.
For example, during a speech in 2002 Obama gave us a heart-rending story of his grandfather's service in uniform during World War II.
"My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's Army," stated Obama.
"He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain."
Of course, this little snippet is false. Both Auschwitz and Treblinka were over-run by Soviet troops. In fact, Treblinka was razed to the ground years before the Red Army rumbled through what was left by the Nazis in its place, a field of flowers.
The Obama camp was quick, this time, to point out the senator was mistaken and meant that his great uncle entered Buchenwald.
Despite the clarification of which relative it was and which death camp it was, the Obama campaign made no mention of the fact that Obama has been getting it wrong since 2002.
Yet, Obama has his share of more serious gaffes which the mainstream press avoids reporting. For example, ABC found that while campaigning in Missouri, Obama stated that U.S. military Arabic translators in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan.
"We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it's harder for us to use them in Afghanistan," stated Obama.
Of course, Obama did not know that Afghans don't speak Arabic. The most common language in Afghanistan is Pashtun, followed by several other dialects. So to transfer the translators from Iraq to Afghanistan would be a worthless effort.
Obama also recently told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez to discuss "his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about."
However, the next day, Obama stated that any country supporting the Marxist guerillas of FARC should suffer "regional isolation."
Obama's flip-flop in 24 hours left campaign advisers scrambling to explain how one can meet Chavez and isolate him at the same time.
The freshman is just as inaccurate when it comes to describing details related to the U.S. national defense.
"I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems," stated Obama during a major policy speech on the U.S. military.
Again, the "unproven" part comes as news — this time to the crew of the USS Lake Erie. The Aegis cruiser has racked up a double-digit string of successful intercepts, including a two-fer shoot down of multiple missiles at the same time and the destruction of a defunct U.S. spy satellite traveling at over 18,000 miles an hour.
Obama has been just as loose with his own personal history. Obama claims to have written the key elements of nuclear legislation.
"So the only nuclear legislation that I've passed has been to make sure that the nuclear industry has to disclose whatever they emit anything that might be considered radioactive and share that with local and state communities. I just did that last year," stated Obama in Iowa in 2007.
What Obama forgot was his bill did not "pass" the Senate and become law. The bill died in the full Senate basically due to Democrat infighting.
Like so many gaffes before and after, the Obama campaign quickly placed a caveat on the Senator's statement, saying that his proposal made so much sense that the nuclear industry started doing it on a "voluntary basis." Of course, no mention of why the senator said it passed when the record clearly shows it flopped.
Several pundits have called Obama a "gaffe machine." His pandering attempt to suck up to Veterans, invoking false memories that muddle history only highlights so many other miss-statements spewed by the rookie during the campaign.
Ironically, while Obama's great uncle had the courage to free death camp prisoners in Hitler's Germany, the senator does not feel that a similar effort should have been made today. If Obama had his way, the death camps inside Iraq would still be bursting at the seams with the dead, tortured, and dying.
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