Obama Politicizes the Holocaust

Is there nothing sacred to liberals seeking power? In the latest attempt to plumb the depths of decency, Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama sought to use the liberation of Nazi death camps to push for his version of expanded government health care.

From the Washington Post: Obama's Uncle and the Liberation of Auschwitz:

"I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps," Obama said, slowly and methodically. "And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn't leave the house for six months. Alright? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren't the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain."

What man could speak about the horrors of Auschitz, and somehow make it not about the millions of Jews that suffered and died in the death camps, but instead about how terribly hard it was for his uncle to deal with it, and how it showed that we needed better mental health care. That takes the "it's all about me" candidacy to a new low -- even the Jewish slaughter takes a back seat to how it effected Obama's family.

Oh, you may read elsewhere about all the mistakes in this story. It wasn't Obama's Uncle, it was his great uncle. It wasn't Auschwitz, and it wasn't really a liberation. The Post provides information about it in a factchecker segment Where is Auschwitz:

In an attempt to burnish his credentials with America's veterans, Barack Obama has frequently talked about his grandfather "who served in Patton's army." He has now added a new episode to his World War II repertoire: the uncle who liberated Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the story shows that the presumptive Democratic nominee has a poor grasp of European history and geography.

Actually, the WP is a little harsh, but also a little kind. Because long before Obama was running for President, back in 2002, he gave an anti-war speech where he told a similar story, but in that story his Grandfather had "heard stories" from the Americans who had liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka -- except of course Americans didn't liberate either of those two camps. Oddly, Obama never mentioned his Uncle in that speech.

Which seems strange, doesn't it? If he heard family stories about his uncle liberating concentration camps, why in 2002 does he instead attribute the stories to unnamed people talking to his Grandfather? And why, if Obama claims using Auschwitz this week was a simple mistake, did he make the identical mistake in 2002?

But frankly, the entire discussion of whether Obama's story was true or not is a smokescreen to keep us from seeing the REAL story. Which is that Obama used the horror of the death camps NOT to argue for the importance of defending freedom, or to make sure countries like Iran never succeed in getting a bomb that could finish the job Hitler started.

No, he invoked death camps to argue for better mental health care, and trivialized the tragic outcomes for millions of Jews and others by focusing instead on how "traumatized" his Uncle was at having to see it.

oh, but don't worry about Obama. He understands the rules about politicizing things -- and generally, Democrats get away with it. In fact, after many people pointed out his errors, he had the audacity (he excels at audacity) to claim that his opponents were the ones politicizing the holocaust (a wonderful attempt at projection):

Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesman, decried "using the Holocaust and concentration camps as a political football."

Remember, this is the spokesperson of a candidate who just used the Holocaust and concentration camps to argue that he should be elected because he is for better mental health care benefits.

Update: And his claim that we did nothing for mental health after WW2 appears to be a lie as well. There was a movie done in 1946 called "let there be light":

The final entry in a trilogy of films produced for the U.S. government by John Huston. This documentary film follows 75 U.S. soldiers who have sustained debilitating emotional trauma and depression. A series of scenes chronicle their entry into a psychiatric hospital, their treatment and eventual recovery

But that doesn't sound as politically helpful as "he locked himself in the attic for 6 months".