Quote:
Originally posted by Not Bob
I'd say it's more of a Ronald Reagan problem -- you know, kind of like telling the prime minister of Israel about how he was able to liberate the concentration camps in Europe from his stint in the Army training film studios in Hollywood.
edited to add cite -- from: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...ity-index.html
The Liberator.
In November 1983, Reagan told visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. He repeated the story to Simon Wiesenthal the following February. Reagan never visited or filmed a concentration camp; he spent World War II in Hollywood, making training films with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps.
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Don't get me wrong... I liked Reagan's fiscal policy and the fact that he was a tough bastard (Afghanistan would be glowing green today if he were in office). But I recall hearing about that WWII fib and thinking "God, its creepy... the man totally invented a holocaust story and told it to a crowd of Jews." You can lie about meeting david Lee Roth in the elevator at the Plaza, or having seen Anna Kournikova on anude beach, or having hit a hole in one, nailed a 360 dunk in your HS basketball championship game, thrwon a 100 mph fastball, tagged half of the Tri Delts on campus in college, made $1 mil in software in the 90s or even claim to know where the Ark of the Covenant is...
...but you don't tell a bunch of poeple whose families died in concentration camps that you saw that horror firsthand and know what they're talking about.
That story always freaked me out. It was too early in his tenure for Reagan to have been under the early sway of Alzheimer's, so its pretty clear the man was a tad demented. Since it was isolated, I pretend it was one aberrant incredible judgment lapse from an otherwsie quality person.
