Reply #67: A LIE...a stretch is a lie.

[Caliman73]

The purpose of her statement was to create an image of her father that would bolster her own credentials as an anti-racist. She deliberately withheld details in the statement that would have lessened the impact of the statement. While civilians in the war effort did help and were important to the war effort, to say "My father died fighting the Nazi..." implies that the Nazis were directly responsible for his death, which implies that he died in combat.

Here is a hypothetical...If I say, "my dad died in Vietnam, he's a hero" Your assumption would be that my father died doing something heroic like saving a buddy, or rushing a machine gun nest. If I were to tell you later that he actually fell into a foxhole in Da Nang during the monsoon season and drowned because he was drunk, that would change the image. My statement in that context would have been deliberately vague to cause you to see my father in a way that was not honest.

That is what Brewer did by failing to mention that her father worked stateside. That doesn't make what her father did for the war effort meaningless. Just like in my hypothetical, my father may have well been a hero prior to his very un-heroic death, but by tying the death to the heroism, I am making the impression by hiding details, hence the lie. She could have said, "My father was vehemently against the Nazis such that he went to work in a munitions factory and died as a result of breathing the fumes while trying to support the war effort." That would have been the honest truth although the impact would not have been as robust.

She lied.