Obama gets history wrong yet again?
Maybe we should start keeping track of the times this guy gets a historical recitation right. It'll probably be a lot less work.
Obama seems to be surpassing even the inaccuracy record of John F. "I was in Cambodia for Christmas" Kerry. If a Republican had gotten things wrong as often as Obama seems to be doing, the press would be screaming at the top of its lungs, and insisting that such foot-in-mouth incidents proved he wasn't fit to be President. When will we start hearing them draw such conclusions about Barack Obama?
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http://opinionjournal.com
Rewriting History
from "Best of the Web"
by JAMES TARANTO
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.
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