Yeh, All This Because He Doesn’t Know One Camp From Another, Man

So, but for the concession, it appears all over. Seems, then, it is worth focusing more so on the likely nominees. The other day, Senator “will definitely change the course of humanity” Obama supporter (although believing that would appear to define one as being rather more than just any mere “supporter”) Jon Taplin noted how he believes he’s noticed something really big:

[Sen Obama] is showing an ability to catch McCain in a gaffe and not let up…

He was referring to this, from Sen Obama, quoted in Time:

…anyone running for Commander-in-Chief should know better. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own view, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq – 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer – that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Senator McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to “nitpicking.”

“Well I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged…

Such is cited by him apparently at least partly in response to Sen Obama’s recent Auschwitz “gaffe”. Or as Mr Taplin chided one commenter, who provided a long quote from an article on Sen Obama’s other “gaffes”:

All of this because Obama said Auschwitz and not Buchenwald? You are grabing at straws, man. And don’t post long quotes from Newsmax–the notrious right wing propaganda organization, if you don’t mind.

That “don’t post long quotes” response is reasonable enough. It was too longish a comment clipping. That said, it’s undoubtedly a shame it managed to omit one issue with which Mr Taplin might well have actually concurred: that Sen Obama, in misplacing Auschwitz, merely demonstrated how happily in tune he is with a goodly chunk of the “highly educated” electorate.

How? Well, many of them probably never knew where Auschwitz was either. So even though that piece by that “notrious right wing propaganda organization” characterizes it as a gaffe, doing so makes it seem all too light-hearted. A gaffe is better described as when, exhausted after an 18 hour day, you mindlessly blurt out, umm, “North Dakota” when you clearly meant “North Carolina.”

Instead, it begs a worrying, larger question. Does Sen Obama’s weakish historical knowledge regarding Auschwitz — the hell on earth that stands, almost without argument, as the most disgusting single example of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity — provide us with a degree of insight into Sen Obama’s perhaps being rather less “intellectually heavyweight” than we had been led to believe? Or, put another way, how much more might Sen Obama not know, but which we are led to believe he does?

_____________________________

It being a political campaign, Sen Obama’s views on Sen McCain’s views are hardly worth anyone’s blogging time. Unsurprisingly, Sen Obama is going to go out of his way always to try to show his opponent’s in the worst possible light. (Presumably, although Sen Obama above admits — twice — that even he himself knows only vaguely “around” how many troops were, and are, in Iraq at any given time, his hesitating to give us an “exact” number doesn’t itself ever constitute “evasion”, or serve as a means to try to fuzz over a degree of “non-knowledge”, of course.) Similarly, Sen McCain will do the same things to Sen Obama, whenever given a chance.

What matters more is how others choose to pick up candidates’ to-ings and fro-ings and try to roll with such. In this case, evidently seeing some sort of “gotcha” opportunity, Mr Taplin positions Sen McCain’s “surge” numbers citation as a bigger “gaffe” than Sen Obama’s having misplaced Auschwitz. (Or Buchenwald? Well, once you’ve read about one camp, you’ve read about ‘em all, right?) The main reason: Sen McCain’s poor grasp of such detail should lead us to question his ability to frame policy as president.

Essentially, Sen McCain’s “surge mistake” now is obviously way more important than where Auschwitz was then dude.

Hmmm, to support that argument, though, it would seem one first must step back and actually compare Sen McCain’s observation in context against Sen Obama’s Buchenwald “Auschwitz”, also in context.

So let’s see. To recall, in Auschwitz between 1 million to 1.5 million unarmed men, women and children (particularly Jews) herded into obscene conditions, were barely fed, worked to death, shot and gassed, and their remains incinerated. Of course, in our world today of perpetually ridiculous hyperbole tossed about regarding “America’s gulag“, the horrors of Auschwitz, and the Holocaust more generally are, as a consequence, routinely extraordinarily diminished. Yet when they liberated it, even Stalin’s soldiers were sickened at what they had discovered: that they, from where they came, and after the grisly battlefields they had endured, could still feel such, would seem to speak extra-volumes about its horrors.

Now this blog may be going out on a crazy limb here, but yours truly actually suspects nearly all U.S. soldiers (most of whom know far more military history than does the general population) today would be among the first “to tell” us all that anyone who can’t see the debating shortcoming inherent in, and moral difference between, juxtaposing an Iraq deployment for themselves vs. Auschwitz gas chambers for hundreds of thousands is, to be polite, missing something. (And likely in more than one sense of the meaning those words may convey.) They’d probably tell us also that they can somehow still believe so even while being disgracefully lumped together numerically, unmentioned by name, and shoe and neck size measurements, as individuals.

Although, then again, we know also that “progressive” bloggers are more expansive-thinking about such difficult moral matters than are simpleton U.S. soldiers.

Yet even accepting for our purposes here that Sen McCain’s count was off, given the far greater breadth of his own intellect, Sen Obama, simply put, really still needs anyway to do vastly better than attempt to pinpoint Sen McCain’s obvious blockhead tendencies. Why? Because no one asserts honestly that our Sen McCain would be a “philosopher” president, towering head and shoulders above all advisors and anyone else around him. Ah, but youthful, brilliant Sen Obama, in welcome contrast, stands at the intimidating peak of his mental powers, which are monstrous (or so we keep being reminded) and, in fact, probably close to unassailable by anyone now walking the planet.

Therefore, it is reassuring to learn of Sen Obama’s ready grasp of every (non-Auschwitz/ non-Buchenwald) military nuance and detail. When president, for example, at the drop of a hat he will, unlike a President McCain, instantanously always immediately summon from memory all troop numbers deployed at any moment, in every command. Good thing, too, for a military expert like himself will thankfully save us all the embarrassment of watching him sandbagged as was, say, Segolene Royal. She, on the hop, we may recall, didn’t know how many nuclear submarines France had in service.

So when some reporter blurts out, “President Obama, how many aircraft does the Sixth Fleet have in the Mediterranean?” he’ll rattle off the response without recourse to notes, or to an assistant. Wait, check that. He’ll undoubtedly first fire back at that smart aleck reporter, “Are you counting attack helicopters also?”

_____________________________

Having addressed Sen McCain’s “10,000,” let’s zero in on the other half: the even more relevant comparison. For since no one can so much as hope to measure up in intellect terms against Sen Obama, how about measuring Sen Obama against . . . Sen Obama? Specifically, Sen Obama’s grasp of a mainstream major historical fact vs. what Sen Obama himself is supposed to be, and, more importantly, represent.

To best do so in context, consider, for a moment, separately, our current leader. Insofar as yours truly is aware, no one has ever straightforwardly accused George W Bush of being a deep thinker, let alone an intellectual. (Although The Times’ Gerard Baker somehow came close to at least the former, but that was probably just owing to his temporarily being overcome — …the door of the most famous room in the world opens and a genial President steps forward to greet us… — by the White House aura.) But had President Bush merely misspelled Auschwitz, one can also imagine the sniggering at how his having done so merely confirmed his status as national village idiot.

Yet so many seem to feel they can conveniently have it both ways with Sen Obama. On the one hand, he is Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, JFK, Dag Hammarskjold and MLK combined, with some Nelson Mandela grafted on for good measure. Okay, fine.

But, on the other, one might also think at the very least that as an Harvard law educated intellectual titan who is all of those and probably then some (and, as we were told at the very top, for humanity as a whole, much more), Sen Obama would know for sure where Auschwitz had been located? Is it unreasonable for us to expect that “depth” of knowledge from a president who will likely be the “Person of the Century?”

Clearly so. After all, talk about real “nitpicking”: come on, Auschwitz was last century, man.

Therein lies the danger. In always boosting up Sen Obama’s brilliance bar ever the higher, the more that is then not unreasonably expected of him. As Woodrow Wilson once said (if we are still permitted to quote him), “He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it.” Yet Sen Obama, our soon to be scholar-leader and “man of the world” . . . didn’t know Auschwitz was in Poland.

As observed by Viking Pundit, “…how did a guy who just four years ago was reviewing zoning laws in Chicago now poised to become Leader of the Free World?” Indeed, maybe Sen Obama really is little better than the state senator he was four years ago, and has been elevated prematurely far beyond his capabilities? But, no, it couldn’t be that.

However, what we do know for sure is we have five more months of this. Who knows what new intellectual ground will be broken during that span?: “Ah, I remember my great aunt telling me of her first trip to Ljubljana, Slovakia…”

Oh, Slovenia? Slovakia, whatever. Such tells us nothing. Just “grabing at straws,” when he’s clearly a genius, right?