NATIONAL REVIEW OBVIOUSLY THINKS DIFFERENTLY... (via Lou Gots):

Our Historically Challenged President: A list of distortions. (Victor Davis Hanson, 6/11/09, National Review)

[D]espite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation.

This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Both are impossible. The Americans didn’t free either Nazi death camp. (Regarding Obama’s great uncle’s war experience, the Obama team later said he’d meant the camp at Buchenwald.)

Much of what Obama said to thousands of Germans during his Victory Column speech in Berlin last summer was also ahistorical. He began, “I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” He apparently forgot that for the prior eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — both African-Americans.

...but for the rest of the image of an Ivy League intellectual is that of a historical ignoramus.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 11, 2009 12:14 PM