Obama Says Uncle

On Memorial Day, Barack Obama told a group of veterans, “My grandfather marched in Patton’s army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you."

He went on to talk about an uncle, "part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz" and, returning from the war, spent six months in an attic: “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

Since then, the GOP gaffe police have been gleefully pointing out it was the Russians who freed Auschwitz and that Obama's mother was an only child, causing his campaign to scramble and admit that he should have said "great uncle" and "Buchenwald."

Sloppy as he may been with the words, Obama had the music right, as a Patton army contemporary of his ancestors can attest.

In the spring of 1945, we were sweeping through Germany and Austria. Along the way, we saw stragglers in ragged stripes, dazed gaunt figures wandering the roads and being picked up by Army trucks. We didn't know the names of the places they had come from, but we knew who they were, and the sight of them was an indelible reminder of why we had been fighting.

Most of us didn't spend any time in attics after coming home, but our lives were changed forever by having seen what human savagery can do.

Obama was trying to evoke and honor that pain. What he said might not win any prizes on a quiz show, but it was true to the spirit of Memorial Day and human decency.

No Crying Shame

This is starting out as a year for tears.

Days after Hillary Clinton rescued her campaign by welling up in a New Hampshire coffee shop, George W. Bush wept yesterday at a Holocaust memorial in Israel, expressing sorrow over US failure in World War II to bomb Auschwitz and save some of the victims.

Sen. Clinton was clearly crying in response to her own stress, but the President's tears seem more complicated. Faced with visible evidence of more than a million murders, he turned from aerial views of the concentration camp and told Condoleeza Rice, "We should have bombed it." Before leaving, he wrote in the visitor's book, "God Bless Israel, George Bush."

For a man who believes in a world divided into Good and Evil, that is an understandable reaction, but is there something more in him than self-righteous certainty?

Last year, at a ceremony awarding a posthumous Medal of Honor to a Marine who threw himself over a grenade and saved the lives of two men in his unit, Bush wept as he said, “He was the guy who signed on for an extra two months in Iraq so he could stay with his squad...to make sure that everyone makes it home alive."

As we reach for change in American leadership, Bush's tears evoke sadness that his capacity to grieve for that Marine and his family as well as Holocaust victims never led him to join the majority of those he serves who want to put an end to killing as the means of choice to make the world safer.

Now we know that Hillary Clinton can cry over herself, but will she or whoever else succeeds George Bush be truly committed to sparing American families tears in the years ahead?