Bush Forgets His Grandpa Profited from Nazi Slave Labor

George Bush toured the Holocaust memorial in Israel yesterday, and through tears, came up with a telling formulation about what his predecessor, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, should have done to stop the horror at the German concentration camps:

President George W. Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.

Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial today calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

Mainly, though, it's hard to get past the cognitive dissonance of reading an utterance from Bush that was not crafted by the White House political shop and focus-grouped in Paramus to ensure the words he speaks do not mean what they say.

It also reminds us of the unique kid-glove treatment George W. Bush receives from the media. It is impossible to imagine any other politician whose grandfather had profited from Nazi slave labor who could tour a Holocaust memorial with the media in tow and not be hounded for a comment on his grandfather's role in the horror.