Obama's Evolving Aushwitz Gaffe

The right blogosphere about some of the comments made in the preceeding video. It all started when A CBS news report had this item in their blog.

Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz. He said the family legend is that, upon returning from war, his uncle spent six months in an attic. “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” Obama said. “That’s why this idea of making sure that every single veteran, when they are discharged, are screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need – that’s why it’s so important.”

The reporter, Maria Gavrilovic, reported the news straight. The problem is that Obama's recollection has factual errors. Here is the history from Ace of Spades...

Auschwitz of course is in Poland. It was liberated by the Red Army on Jan 27 1945. Poland, on most maps is usually placed to the east of Germany, although we may need to investigate the geography textbooks the Messiah used as a child...

The Allies were wrapping up the battle of the bulge in late January of 1945 -- the Rhine crossings were still well into the future when Auschwitz was liberated. The
first, the Remagen railway bridge which was discovered intact, was crossed on
March 7 1945.

Furthermore, the inaccurate information doesn't stop there. Obama says this happened to his uncle, except his mother is an only child...

questioning nature — were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley — after himself.

It's possible that Obama was told the story wrong, or simply remembers it wrong, about which camp his relative's unit entered, but I am having trouble believing that he doesn't know which relative it is. This is yet another in what is becoming a plethora of gaffes. Also, Jeff Emanuel does an excellent job of recounting the numerous factual errors Barack Obama has made when trying to put someone in his family in th middle of historical events.

You will all remember the bruhaha surrounding John McCain mixing up Sunni and Shia. We simply never see the same interest from the MSM over most of Obama's gaffes (San Fran bitter excluded). As such, he is allowed to make mistakes at what is now becoming an alarming rate and the media is simply uninterested in the errors.

Update: Obama says that it was his grand uncle not his uncle and that the camp was not Auschwitz but Ohrdruf. I can buy that and frankly I have nothing to the contrary. I will say the Dems no longer have any credibility in bringing up McCain's Sunni/Shia flub. Obama just made two mistakes in the course of one speech.