“Ignorance And Incompetence”

Remember when Barack Obama, the smooth-talking “smart’ Ivy Leaguer, was going to improve our standing overseas with his “smart diplomacy?”

Either do the people of Poland:

During an East Room ceremony honoring 13 Medal of Freedom recipients, Obama said that [Polish underground hero Jan] Karski “served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action.”

The administration is claiming President Obama “mis-spoke” – and, truth be told, I get that.  The extermination camps were in Poland.

Which had, as it happens, been occupied with exceptional brutality by the Nazis, who considered the Poles very nearly as untermensch as the Jews.  Calling the death camps “Polish” is like calling Wounded Knee “Native American” or slavery “African”; technically accurate, morally tone-deaf.

Said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk:

“It’s a pity that such a dignified ceremony was overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence.”

I’m just going to go and bask in all that newfound respect we’ve gotten.

UPDATE:  By the way – I scanned in vain for a sign that any of the local TV stations covered this flap this morning.  They covered the fact that Bob Dylan also got a Presidential Medal of Freedom – but hey, he’s from Minnesota, right?

But they also noted Madeleine Albright, one of the worst Secretaries of State we’ve ever had, and certainly not a local angle.

I bring it up because it’s become a bit of a chanting point among the Twin Cities far left that Twin Cities TV stations are “conservative”.

Seems a bit of a reach, is all I’m saying.

6 thoughts on ““Ignorance And Incompetence”

  1. Ignorance? Incompetence? Impossible. He’s a minority. Only white people have the power to make ignorant or incompetent comments. It wasn’t even a gaffe, it was a statement of a new fact which will probably soon be included as an “updated” history in public schools.

  2. Local media? KSTP 5 (my choice for local news) had these two stories in the past week:

    A) Gideons were handing out Bibles on the public sidewalk in front of a high school. The story was about how horrible this is and what can be done to stop this.

    B) THere is a new gift store in St Louis Park that sells greeting cards for homosexuals. It was quite the free info-mercial for this.

  3. Obama has the genius of a general who wins every battle . . . every battle where he has tactical superiority. The victories libs celebrate were either achieved when his held congress (stimulus, obamacare, ending DADT) or when he could ignore the fact that the other party held congress (telling the AG not to enforce DOMA).
    Bush was better able to build a consensus than Obama. Obama reached his level of peak competence when he was a state legislator from a safe, urban district in a corrupt state.

  4. On the bright side, Obama has hired an aide that will help translate Austrian into English for him.

  5. There is more to the Poles being upset about the teleprompter reader saying ‘Polish’ death camps. The Poles wanted Lech Walesa to accept the medal on behalf of the late Jan Karski. The White House nixed that idea. Some believe this was payback from Barry due to the fact that Walesa refused to make a cameo (ala Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live) at some concert-style appearance The One was making in Poland last year. Walesa refused to make the appearance without getting a one-on-one meeting as well. Petty nonsense, but hey that’s ‘smart’ diplomacy for you.
    A lot of people are blaming the ‘Polish death camps’ phrase on the staffer who fed those words into the tele-prompter (shades of Ron Burgundy, anyone?). Given the fact that many of the staffers are 20-somethings whose idea of history is that it started in roughly the 2nd Reagan administration, this seems plausible. But Barry is just a few years older than me and I can’t imagine seeing that line in TOTUS and not making a correction on the fly.
    Some have remarked that the Poles have it in for Barry because he cancelled positioning anti-missle defense batteries in Poland on the 70th anniversary of the Germans invading Poland. Some have remarked that they have it in for Barry because he’s a narcissistic dumb-ass. Can’t they both be right?

  6. Seflores wrote:
    Some have remarked that the Poles have it in for Barry because he cancelled positioning anti-missle defense batteries in Poland on the 70th anniversary of the Germans invading Poland. Some have remarked that they have it in for Barry because he’s a narcissistic
    Also, they are racists.

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