For months, the Republican National Committee, grumbling John McCain staffers and an array of conservative bloggers have tried to label Obama as a serial exaggerator and an heir to Al Gore, who Republicans successfully tarred in 2000 as someone who claimed to have discovered Love Canal and invented the Internet.

It just wasn’t sticking.

Now, they think they’ve caught him red handed.

Obama didn’t mince words in the story of his uncle yesterday in New Mexico. As he spoke of the need to provide combat veterans better health care, especially better mental health care, Obama let loose a three-Pinocchio doozy:

“I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps,” Obama said, slowly and methodically. “And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn’t leave the house for six months. Alright? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

[…]

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Source: blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/05/27/obamas_uncle_and_the_liberatio.html
By Jonathan Weisman
Posted at 5:41 PM ET on May 27, 2008