Well, it was one of those camps

From The Washington Post:

The Republican National Committee, grumbling John McCain staffers and conservative bloggers have tried for months to label Barack Obama as a serial exaggerator and heir to Al Gore, whom Republicans tarred in 2000 as someone who claimed to have discovered the Love Canal disaster and invented the Internet.

It just wasn't sticking. But yesterday, they thought they'd finally caught him red-handed.

Speaking in New Mexico on Memorial Day, Obama said a great-uncle had helped to liberate the Auschwitz death camp at the end of World War II. "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 (a YouTube clip of the remarks quickly went viral online).

He continued: "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. All right? 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."

That may be a fact, the RNC noted gleefully -- but only if Obama's uncle had served in the Red Army of Joseph Stalin, which liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945.

Obama's campaign said yesterday that he had erred in naming the camp but not in describing the role of his great-uncle, who partook in the liberation of Buchenwald.

"Senator Obama's family is proud of the service of his grandfather and uncles in World War II -- especially the fact that his great uncle was a part of liberating one of the concentration camps at Buchenwald. Yesterday he mistakenly referred to Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald in telling of his personal experience of a soldier in his family who served heroically," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. It also clarified that the great-uncle served in the 89th Infantry Division that "liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald."

Obama vaguely remembered hearing about some kind of relative who had something to do with liberating a Nazi concentration camp so when he needed to come up with some kind of story to connect himself with an American military triumph he took a guess and said that it was an uncle who liberated Auschwitz, which is probably the only Nazi concentration camp whose name he could remember off hand. He expected the media to lap it up and his supporters to praise him and all the embittered Jesus-freaks with their squirrel guns to figure that maybe he wasn't so bad after all.

Obama didn't remember whether the relative was an uncle or a great-uncle (I also think he's told one version of the story in the past where the relative was his grandfather) or whether the camp was Ohrdruf or Auschwitz because he has never really cared.

The story of American forces liberating a Nazi forced-labor camp was not a story about America's meanness or its cruelty and injustice so it had little resonance with Obama either when he was growing up or now in his adulthood. It isn't that Obama is ashamed of his great-uncle and what he did it is simply that the America which defeated Hitler and liberated the camps and ended the Holocaust is not the America that Obama prefers to live in. To most Americans the most important thing which happened in May of 1945 was the German surrender which ended the war in Europe. To someone like Obama the most important thing to happen in May of 1945 was the installation of a "white only" water fountain in the courthouse in Columbia, SC.

The America of slavery and segregation is the America in which Obama can feel aggrieved and entitled. And Obama, a man of truly mediocre intellect and ability, defines himself by his grievances and advances himself through entitlement. They are his best friends, giving him an identity and his station in life. They took him to some of the best schools in America and put him in the Illinois state legislature then the United States Senate and will soon, he hopes, put him in the White House. So examples of America's greatness and goodness simply slip past Obama with scarcely a notice. They don't fit the narrative which defines Obama's life.

I wonder if Obama will have the wit to understand that an America in which he can become president, or even almost become president, is an America which has put those segregated water fountains so far behind it that they have as little to do with modern America as the 17th century tulip bubble.

I doubt it because then he would have to part company with grievance and entitlement and a man does not easily abandon what has taken him so far.