Winston Churchill is very hot in right-wing circles, isn't he? Latest case in point: Pain-in-the-ass Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the storied British PM in his silly speech to Congressional Republicans last week, and John Boehner presented his Israeli patsy with a bust of Churchill afterwards. And wasn't there some flap once upon a time about President Obama removing Winston's head from the Oval Office in favor of Martin Luther King's? All very dippy.
Because as anyone familiar with history knows, it's always ridiculous that the GOP, Netanyahu and their ilk reach for those lazy Churchill-Chamberlain-Nazi-appeasement references. But it's even more telling that they do it when events like the 100th anniversary of the Lusitania sinking come along.
See, Winston Churchill kind of had a "Bin Laden Determined to Attack In the US" problem.
As a new book on the Lusitania centenary reminds us, the British knew that a U-boat "was...somewhere in the North Atlantic under orders to sink troop transports and any other British vessel it encountered; and knew as well that the submarine was armed with enough shells and torpedoes to sink a dozen ships." Yet Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, neglected to provide the luxury liner with an official Naval escort.
We know now that Churchill was keen for something that would bring America into the First World War, and apparently was willing to let it be a disaster like the Lusitania. We have no idea why the Worst Person Who's Ever Lived ignored the Presidential Daily Brief of August 6, 2001.
Don't get us wrong: We cats generally admire Churchill. In addition to being perhaps the most important Prime Minister in UK history, he was a great writer, orator and — unlike Bush and Hitler — even a good painter. But we don't unthinkingly invoke him every time we want to make a point about leadership, because we know that people are complicated and Winston had many flaws. We find it ironic — and interesting — that the Republicans, whose most recent President brushed off a sure warning about 9/11, have no such qualms.
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