Gerry Ford Redux: Obama’s ‘Polish Death Camp’ Gaffe
Back in October of 1976, Time magazine reported “The Blooper Heard Round the World:”
Chopping the air with his right hand, Gerald Ford boldly declared: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration.”
Incredulous, New York Times Associate Editor Max Frankel asked a follow-up question that offered Ford a chance to retreat, but Ford lowered his head and charged into a trap of his own making. By his reckoning, Yugoslavia, Rumania and even Poland were not under the Soviet thumb. “Each of these countries is independent, autonomous; it has its own territorial integrity.”
Thus, in his second debate with Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford made what could well be the most damaging statement of his career.
Flash-forward to today, when Obama made a gaffe involving Poland and the totalitarianism that was forced upon it that rivals Ford’s: “President Obama Causes Outrage with Reference to ‘Polish Death Camp,’” Jake Tapper reports at ABC:
Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”
The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”
Sikorski also tonight tweeted a link to an Economist story noting that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland. For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder. Unfortunately this seems to have escaped Barack Obama’s staff seem not to have noticed this.”
As Seth Mandel noted earlier this month at Commentary, “it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).” Nice Obama to rectify that omission with his latest gaffe.
LOLZ! No wonder Obamalinsky doesn’t want his transcripts released…
Greetings from Poland everyone! This “wonderful” president declared on the 70th. anniversary of the German invasion of Poland that he wanted to abandon the missile shield. When the Polish president was killed, he did not even have the human decency to sign the condolence book at the Polish embassy-he had to go golfing.Now this.Seriously, I am very angry right noww-Amercia PLEASE get rid of him asap, we believe in you, you are our ally we have put trust into.
I remember watching that debate in 1976 and recall seeing Jimmy Carter smirking at the other podium as Ford doubled down on his dumb mistake.
Let’s hope we do not double down on our dumb mistake in November. What a boob.
And the Left claims Dan Quayle’s the stupid one!
OMG. Did the foreign minister of a sovereign ally just refer to the administration (aka The President) as ignorant and incompetent? Did that really happen?
I’ve been saying for some time that overseas politicians have the power to bring Obama down. If they, in significant numbers, started talking exactly this way, he’d be doomed.
And now they are talking exactly this way…..
Ou-wwwwwwwwwwwwwch!
Warsaw is the largest Polish city in the world. Number two is Chicago. How in hell does someone rise up in Chicago politics and not get Polish sensitivities?
I can get an off-the-cuff “57 states” when you meant “47 states.” But these are scripted remarks. Presumably Dear Liar didn’t write them, he had a speech writer write them, backed up with researchers. And this isn’t the first time one of his planned speeches has had such an egregious error in it. If he’s the smartest man in the room, it’s only because he surrounds himself with idiots.
“How in hell does someone rise up in Chicago politics and not get Polish sensitivities?”
South side, baby. For all Obama’s machine knows, those Poles might as well be in Waukegan. Imagine, say, how a Harlem pol might feel about the Manhattan glitterati and you’d have a rough (pun intended) idea.
I guess this means Katyn Forest was a “Polish massacre.” Or maybe a mass suicide. Sneaky old Poles…
So, this means he can see Warsaw from his golf cart, right?
One thing’s for sure, Americans from all 57 states will be able to hear the crickets from 30 Rock on this one.
I’d give Obama a pass on this one. Many of the death camps were in Poland. The largest of them were. So I could see myself shortening death camps located in Poland to Polish death camps without thinking.
So then the question might be, “Why are the Poles making such a big deal out of a simple slip of the tongue?” I believe that the Poles are so sensitive to this topic because of their own guilty consciences. Many of the history books I’ve read have commented on how much the Poles cooperated in rounding-up the Jews.
I still remember an interview with a “woman on the street” in Poland back in the early ’90′s. It was after the Berlin wall was down and Poland was making a difficult transition to capitalism. The interviewer asked her why the economy was so bad (trolling for a criticism of the free market, I suspect). Her reply was to blame it all on the “Jews”. I was amazed. There are almost no Jews today in Poland. And a full generation after many Poles cooperated in wiping out 99% of their Jewish population, they were still blaming all of the troubles on “the Jews.”
Most likely the “woman on the street” was referring to the shortage of Jews. With a few million of them Poland’s economy would probably be doing a lot better.