NY Magazine: “Though war metaphors are common in the language of sports, it appears that Tommy Tuberville, the incoming Republican senator from Alabama, didn’t learn much about World War II in his time coaching Auburn football. On Thursday night in Montgomery, Tuberville told his supporters about the sterling military record of his father, an American G.I. who landed on Normandy Beach in D-Day and drove a tank across western Europe, earning five bronze stars and a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge during his deployment.”

“Despite being of an age at which American men pick up military history as if by osmosis, Tuberville did not seem familiar with the politics of the European theater: In his speech, the new senator described how his father took part in ‘liberating Paris from socialism and communism.’ While this may be an effort to compare his father’s combat experience to his own effort to halt ‘the doctrine of socialism’ in America, the coach’s political framework is off. When First Sergeant Charles Tuberville landed in France in 1944, he was part of a campaign to liberate the Allied power from the Nazis. Though socialism was in the name of the party that Hitler rode into power, the Nazis were, canonically, fascist. And for students of history, Tuberville’s gaffe could accidentally suggest that his father was involved in a different march into Paris in the 1940s.”