Obama and the New Yorker Botch

James Taranto, at the WSJ’s Best of the Web yesterday, notes another Obama whopper, repeated as if it were fact (i.e., without correction or critique) by the New Yorker cover story:  Specifically, the New Yorker quotes Obama as saying in 2002:

    “. . . My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s Army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow-troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. . . .”

James takes it from there:

    In fact, Auschwitz was liberated not by Patton’s army but by Zhukov’s: Like all of Poland, the death camp was taken by the Soviets, not the Americans. As for Treblinka, also in Poland, it was never liberated. In 1943, after a failed uprising, the Germans closed Treblinka and forced the captives to destroy the facility.

    Granted, the error here is Obama’s, not The New Yorker’s, which presumably quoted the candidate accurately. Still, it’s hard to imagine the magazine quoting such a howler from, say, George W. Bush without correcting him. So either the magazine is deliberately withholding information harmful to its favored candidate or its renowned fact-checking department is not as much of a powerhouse as it used to be.