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Tag: memory
Robert Hur

Interview Transcript Proves Special Counsel Falsely Hyped Biden's 'Poor Memory'

Major news outlets that ran dozens of stories hyping then-special counsel Robert Hur’s claim that President Joe Biden evinced a “poor memory” during their interview are now acknowledging that Hur’s depiction was exaggerated after reviewing the newly released transcript.

Hur’s February report stated that following a yearlong investigation into Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents, he had concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted.” But journalists quickly fixated on Hur’s incendiary and unfalsifiable description of Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and his references to specific Biden memory lapses over the course of their five-hour interview.

The mainstream political press treated Hur as an impartial voice levying credible accusations, unleashing a deluge of reports calling Biden’s mental acuity into question. Hur’s background as a former clerk to right-wing judges and a Trump administration appointee — and his gratuitous swipes at a Democratic president that happened to align with a yearslong GOP campaign to portray Biden as addled — failed to raise their alarms.

But after reviewing the full transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur, released Tuesday morning before Hur’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, several outlets are concluding that the then-special counsel’s claims in his report lacked necessary context.

The Washington Post ran 33 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to a review by Popular Information. On Tuesday, however, the Postreported that the transcript “paints a more nuanced portrait of the exchanges between Biden and the special counsel” and that “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.” With regard to some of the specific instances Hur cited in describing Biden’s memory as “significantly limited,” the Post found that “the transcript provides more detail on those exchanges, with questioning jumping around the timeline in some instances.”

The New York Times ran 30 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, according to Popular Information. But on Tuesday, the Timesreported the transcript “shows that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, while otherwise appearing clearheaded.” As to Hur’s claim that Biden “did not remember when he was vice president,” the Times noted: “The transcript provides context for those lines. In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”

The Times further found that “Mr. Hur was selective in portraying Mr. Biden’s memory of an ambassador’s position.”

The Wall Street Journal ran 18 reports on Biden’s mental fitness in the four days following Hur’s report, Popular Information found. On Tuesday, however, the paper reported that the transcript shows Biden “veering into frequent digressions, but not stumped on basic factual questions.”

Hur has raised more questions about his own credibility since issuing his report. The lawyer who reportedly prepped him for Tuesday’s hearing is William Burck, a veteran Republican attorney who represented several senior Trump administration aides and serves as a Fox Corp. board member. And Hur arranged to leave the Justice Department on Monday, ensuring that “instead of appearing as a DOJ employee who is bound by the ethical guidelines which govern the behavior of federal prosecutors, he will appear as a private citizen with no constraints on his testimony,” The Independent reported.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Racing Against Time To Remember And Reclaim Pieces Of The Holocaust

Racing Against Time To Remember And Reclaim Pieces Of The Holocaust

Washington — A desperate race against time is now, here in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and across the Jewish community. A race to save firsthand experiences, shards of the Shoah, in voice and memory.

The last generation of Holocaust survivors are in their 80s and 90s, near the end. And what their eyes have seen when they were young is too important to lose to time. The Museum seeks to preserve their eyewitness remembrances and artifacts (such as uniforms, passports, letters) for its international archives.

A narrative can be done simply with a family member, says Dina Gold, a journalist and author who won a settlement from the German government for the elegant six-story office building in Berlin, which her great-grandfather built in 1910. Gold recently wrote a compelling book, “Stolen Legacy,” about her huge moral victory. The Nazis perpetrated the greatest theft in history, in art, land and property.

In an interview, Gold says some survivors prefer to forget the loss and suffering in the Nazi death camps. That was, in a way, a survival skill to build anew afterward.

As survivors know better than anybody, so many millions led unfinished lives. Take Anne Frank, who wrote the famous diary of a young girl before she perished. She would be 86.

Her diary was a testament to her sparkling soul and her Jewish family’s hiding in an Amsterdam attic. If Anne had lived, she’d tell the rest of her tale to the world. I saw the secret attic on my first day of my first trip abroad, at her age. Her voice still spoke in the space.

Holocaust survivors, Gold says, may have lived by the words: “Don’t look back.” Don’t go back there, to that hell of time. Silences become frozen over years, but it’s worth trying to see back to the 1930s and 1940s, when Jewish homes, families and businesses were under siege: rounded up or driven out. From Berlin and Warsaw to Prague and Vienna, Nazi ruthlessness was everywhere at once. The records of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” transports are chillingly accurate.

Yet a tape recorder can set the tone for a serious conversational focus on the past. Expect to hear things tumble out you’ve never heard before. It’s amazing what memories — and perhaps documents — you can find, Gold says.

In the process of melting ice, you will hear “glorious snippets,” Gold declares. “Families should do that (interview.) They will regret it bitterly if they don’t. Then you’ve missed your chance.”

Her grandmother Nellie, who emigrated from Berlin to British Palestine early on, is one example. “She didn’t have a bean,” Gold says, as she raised three children in Tel Aviv and Haifa. But she always looked elegant.

“A lady doesn’t wear jewelry during the day, only a string of pearls.” This was a saying, handed down to daughters. Gold wears her great-grandmother’s Lucie’s pearls often.

A devastating discovery awaited Gold, finding that a relative, Fritz Wolff, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. He was 52, one of about 1,715 people on the train. In his memory, she requested a Stolperstein brass plaque on the Berlin sidewalk where he lived. The event last summer brought German neighbors out of their houses, crying.

The plaques mark where a Jew last lived or left, before he or she was deported to death. “Stumbling stones” is the largest public art project in Europe.

Gold’s book, available at StolenLegacy.com, is the only book detailing the successful restitution of a building seized by the Nazis. Author Gold says it parallels the film “A Woman in Gold,” which tells of recovering a Klimt painting. The building, Krausenstrasse 17/18, is close to the old Checkpoint Charlie. It still stands today. The Soviet occupiers of East Berlin marked it as belonging to a Jewish owner, which aided Gold’s later quest to prove it belonged to her family.

For other resources on Holocaust memory, murder and theft, Gold suggests several sources.

–The Holocaust Museum: ushmm.org. The First Person Program may be of interest.
— The International Tracing Service: www.its-arolsen.org
–The World Jewish Restitution Organization: www.wjro.org.il
–The Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York can be contacted at:
http://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumer/holocaust/hcpoindex.htm

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Croatian Auschwitz survivor Branko Lustig speaks during a ceremony at Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem July 22, 2015. REUTERS/Nir Elias 

Great News! Chocolate Is Good For Your Brain

Great News! Chocolate Is Good For Your Brain

If you’re always looking for an excuse for your daily or hourly chocolate fix, now you’ve got one – and it’s actually good for you.

A new study headed by neurology professor Scott Small of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and published in the October 26 issue of Nature Neuroscience, showed that some of the natural chemicals in cocoa increase blood flow in some parts of the brain – the effect of which was an improvement in the recognition abilities in the study participants.

The chemicals, called cocoa flavanols, have been the subject of previous memory studies that have shown some correlation between them and some memory functions, but this was the first study to attempt to show cause and effect.

Whether or not studies of the effect of such chemicals can lead to treatments for Alzheimers disease or other forms of dementia is somewhat doubtful as those conditions are highly complex and the negative effects cannot be attributed to one simple cause and effect. Instead, the hope is that the studies will lead to treatment for common age-related memory loss.

But before you make a chocolate run to your local supermarket, be aware that you’ll need to consume over two-dozen chocolate bars every day to get the amount of flavanols you need. That will make you very fat and probably cause you to develop diabetes, which will create all sorts of other problems. There is currently no commercially available supplement that will provide you with the daily 900 milligrams of flavanols that might be effective, but if large-scale studies end up proving cause and effect, you can bet Big Pharma will find a way to turn a profit.

Photo: Wikipedia

Holding Memories For Aunt Millie

Holding Memories For Aunt Millie

CHICAGO — It was the summer of 1969 the first time I came here, two months shy of my 12th birthday.

Mom had brought us to visit my father’s family, most of whom I knew only as characters in the old man’s stories or voices on a long-distance call. Presented with their California nieces and nephews for the first time, my aunts and uncles did the obligatory cooing over us, made the obligatory inquiries as to progress in school. A cheek or two may even have been pinched.

Then the adults retired to their own conversations. Grownups in that era, you may recall, did not spend a lot of time socializing with kids. They were great eminences who towered over our lives, unknowable as mountains.

My aunt Millie was different. She swept in, gathered us up, and took us to the museum to see the dinosaur bones. When you are 11, there is nothing better than dinosaur bones. Unless it’s ice cream, which we also had. I remember my father’s youngest sibling as, well… young (she’d have been in her middle 30s then), pretty, feisty, stylish and fun. She was like a rainbow seen against sepia tones.

So it is painful to find myself here, a few days past my 57th birthday, going to see her in a place that cares for people with Alzheimer’s.

You would know Aunt Millie in a flash. She totters along slowly, yes, but in this place of people slouching in shapeless frocks, she is the only one dolled up to the nines every day: church dress on, makeup applied, nails done, a flowered hat sitting low on her head, the very definition of all dressed up, and nowhere to go.

She asks us — my wife is with me — how we found her here. She asks if she lives here now. She asks if she has to pay anything. She tells me my head has gotten so big. She asks what happened to her car. She weeps.

In her confusion, she repeats herself. And repeats herself. How did we find her here? Is this where she lives now? Does she have to pay anything? And boy, my head has gotten so big. She weeps.

Ruin is the destiny of all flesh. This, I understand. But there’s something especially cruel when ruin takes the mind before the flesh. Without our memories, what are we? We are the equation after the blackboard has been wiped, the sandcastle after the wave — smeared images and shapeless shapes melting into the sand.

When you no longer remember yourself, those who love you must do it for you. I guess that’s what this column is about.

We spend two afternoons with Aunt Millie. On the first, as it happens, the facility has brought a band in to play for a gathering in a common room. Aunt Millie wants to go, so we do. One of the songs is, “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”

Because I am congenitally unable to not act a fool when Temptations classics are played, I put an arm around Aunt Millie and serenade her, thankful the music is too loud for anyone to hear me. To my surprise, Aunt Millie puts her arm around me and returns the favor. I’m watching her lips and she is nailing the words. She remembers.

And we rock back and forth, clowning, singing. “You got a smile so bri-ight, you know you could have been a candle…”

It is one of those moments you watch yourself from outside yourself, knowing even as you live it that it is special, that it contains a pearl of grace.

“I’m holding you so ti-ight, you know you could have been a handle!” It is a moment of absolute clarity.

The next day, we find her walking down the hall, coming home, she insists, from the movies. She asks how we found her. She is surprised to learn she lives here now. I change the subject, tell her I really enjoyed singing with her at the party yesterday.

She frowns. “What party?” she asks.

It is another piece of her, lost to her. But I will keep it for us both.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Volunteers from the “Kissing it Better” charity read poems and recite songs on October 29 2013, to residents of a retirement home in Stratford upon Avon who have been diagnosed with dementia. (AFP/Will Oliver)