The right’s outrage du jour is that President Obama is visiting India instead of traveling to Poland for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will be representing the administration at the ceremony, which is at least somewhat appropriate since Lew is the only Jewish member of the Cabinet.
You’d think the right would be somewhat circumspect about raising this issue since the last time we had a round number anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz we sent our Sith Lord and this happened.
Yes, Dick was being a dick a dick that day – same as every other day of his miserable life.
On the plus side, who knows whose life was, or how many lives were, saved when he skipped duck hunting to go wear the only parka visible in a crowd of world leaders, historians, and other notable figures.
I believe in Yiddish that there’s a term that describes Dick Cheney:
A putz!
An evil putz!!!
So many poutrages, so little time.
Well, there’s no end to the manufactured outrage du jour of the American “conservative” movement. The plutocrats pay big money for the bleatings, blattings and spittleflecks of the Rightwing Noise Machine. It runs full volume 24/7 because it’s very important to keep the conserva-cogs’ hate alive and well. But when’s the last time an American prez attended this ceremony, anyway? It’s got to be pretty far down the diplomatic totem pole.
The focus on Auschwitz sort of distorts the operation of Hitler’s Holocaust. A recent book, Bloodlands, has pointed out that about half of the Jews were killed not by gas in the more “high tech” camps like Auschwitz, but by simply being shot over open pits by the thousands as the German army advanced eastward in 1941. Most of this killing (by bullet) was done in the section of eastern Poland that the Russians had taken in 1939, and in Belarus as the German Army swept over.
As for the death camps, the author points out that a prisoner had a better chance of survival at Auschwitz than in the “true” Polish extermination camps like Belzec and Sobibor–camps where the vast majority of Polish Jews were sent and where basically no one survived, no one.
But it’s nice that the American Rightwing can try to turn even remembrance of the Holocaust into a bitter partisan matter, while implying some sort of anti-Semitism on Obama’s part. They’re always thinkin’!
The Sith Lord careth not of faint and pitiful mewlings of rabble so far below the lofty station of such as he.
The liberation of Auschwitz shouldn’t be a fucking ten-year-anniversary fucking event anyway, with a Gathering of Assholes come to look solemn. We can turn anything into a Hallmark Moment.
Like all those press-hating or press-torturing criminals with their “je suis Charlie” placards from Marine Le Pen to the dictators of Egypt and Turkey. Who needs them?
Again another example of pure GOPNITWIT behavior.
As the Cold War 2.0 continues to unfold, the Ukrainian PM said that the Soviets invaded Germany and Poland has refused to invite Russians, who actually liberated Auschwitz.
So history is finally rewritten.
Glaring omission by the pro-western Polish govt.
Then there’s the invitation extended to Obama to attend the Victory Day celebration commemorating the defeat of the Nazis, which Obama turned down (over the Ukraine situation). That on the heels of Obama declining to attend the Sochi Olympics.
Not only is Putin undoubtedly feeling he’s being shunned and Russia insulted, but he’s also likely to be planning his revenge.
Actually Obama is cutting his India trip short to meet with the Saudis. I wonder how they see him.
This US rightwing outrage drives me totally nuts. Of the eight million or so civilians that the Nazis massacred, how many of those victims could have been spared if other countries, in particular the US, had an open door refugee policy for those targeted victims? And which group in the US opposed such a policy enough that it would have been politically impossible to enact? The parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the same damn bigots alive today that have somehow twisted a remembrance of the end of the horror of Auschwitz into something their families played an instrumental role in bringing to an end. Hell, their parents, etal. are more likely to have cheered upon hearing that the Nazis were killing Jews than to have been horrified by the reports. Given a choice then and today between a multi-cultural, progressive social democracy and Nazism (by another some other name), these jerkwads would go with Nazism.