In general, McClellan describes the president as someone who lacks inquisitiveness and is also deceitfully self-delusional. Long money quote: "As I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, 'I do not recall.' The witness knows no one can get into his head and prove it is not true, so this seems like a much safer course than actually lying. Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. Bush rationalizes it as being acceptable because he is not stating unequivocally anything that could be proven false. If something later is uncovered to show what he knew, then he can deny lying in his own mind."

McClellan's account adds another set of insider anecdotes to the already heaping stack built by previous Bush officials and advisers. Paul O'Neill first described the president's blindness to inconvenient facts six years ago when he talked about Bush's lack of appetite for "analytical rigor, sound information-gathering techniques and real, cost-benefit analysis." The list of administration officials turned bashers includes John Dilulio, Larry Wilkerson, Rand Beers, Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul Pillar, and Matthew Dowd.

On Wednesday, Republicans collectively went completely berserk after Obama said a great-uncle had helped to liberate the Auschwitz death camp at the end of World War II. Once they realized Obama had a great-uncle who had actually helped to liberate Buchenwald, the first camp liberated by Americans, and Obama just misspoke about the Nazi camp in question, conservatives slinked away, waiting for the next manufactured outrage to come up.

But before we leave this non-story altogether, it?s worth pausing to consider what else Obama?s GOP detractors said about this.

Fox News, for example, was even more shameless than usual. One of the hosts of ?Fox and Friends? said, ?It wasn?t Auschwitz. It was a labor camp called Buchenwald.? As part of the same segment, Fox News ran this all-caps message on its bottom-of-the-screen ticker: ?Ohrdruf was a work camp, rather than an extermination camp.?

Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors and a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of Holocaust survivors, who was not at all pleased with Republican smear efforts this week.

I never thought I?d see the day when the Holocaust would be used as a tool for ?gotcha? politics. But over the last two days, we have seen John McCain?s supporters at the Republican National Committee and at Fox News launch tasteless attacks on Barack Obama. In their attempt to score a few political points, they have diminished the experience of those who suffered and died at Buchenwald, and disrespected the service of the heroic American troops who liberated them. [?]

Here are some facts about Buchenwald, which is one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. At this ?work camp,? prisoners were often worked, starved, tortured, or beaten to death. Sometimes they were simply murdered. Roughly 250,000 people were imprisoned there between 1937 and 1945, many of them Jews. Over 50,000 people lost their lives.