Buchenwald-Gate

Wow, this election has gone from the farcical to the obscene pretty quickly, and this time it's not from Hillary, it's from our friends, the Republicans. The GOP is going nuts over the fact that the Democrats have repudiated the polarizing Queen of Darkness and will soon nominate an uncorrupted, charismatic transcendent orator who draws crowds of thousands and has added new voters, and members, to the Democratic party. Meanwhile the GOP candidate is detested by most of the party and is about 1000 years old.

So the GOP has been trying to use whatever they can to slam Obama and the most recent gambit is to say that Obama is stupid and makes gaffes, like confusing Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Ya see, Obama said this on Memorial Day (from CBS):

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.”

Well it turns out that Mr. Barack O'Liar has lied again: it was not his uncle but his Great uncle. Liar. And it wasn't Auschwitz, it was Buchenwald! Super liar!

OK, back to reality. What does it matter? To almost everybody on earth, Auschwitz is a synecdoche for all concentration camps. And it's totally immaterial for Obama's point, which is that his relative liberated a concentration camp and was haunted by the experience. That is all true.

But, according to the links cited by my friends at Balloon-Juice, the right wing crazies have called Obama a liar and a goofball for messing up the facts. Nice try, schmoes, but it doesn't wash. And it would be just silly if the GOPers had stopped there. But they went worse.

The Right-wingers, in order to create a scandal, have to show that it DOES matter which concentration camp Obama's great-uncle liberated. And so, as I read on Balloon, they have to say that while Auschwitz was bad, Buchenwald was NOT THAT BAD:

Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war. The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.

It is crazy beyond comprehension. This was my commentary on BJ:

OK, I’m going to play the “Jew card” on this play. I am named after two (great) uncles who were killed in the Holocaust. I don’t know where they were killed; it could have been in Auschwitz, it could have been in their homes by a mob, it could have been in a ghetto. It does not matter.

Seeing a pile of bodies – who for all I know contain my grandfather’s brothers – and to be told by ANYBODY that it is “merely” a slave camp is beyond obscene.

Yet, as my rational side is pulling me back, I have to say that this episode demonstrates just how much a Republican hates a Democrat: in order to attack a Democrat, a Republican will say that the Nazis weren’t so bad in Buchenwald.

Put another way, Republicans hate Democrats more than they hate Nazis.

Taking it just one step further: the GOP first attacked the story, then found out it was basically true, so now they have to say that Obama's great-uncle was a weenie for suffering PTSD from seeing what was only horrific to a billionth degree and not a trillionth degree.