Thanks for the amus­ing “Obama, Cal­houn and the Churchill Bust-Out.” What do you say how­ever about the Daily Telegraph’s spec­u­la­tion that Obama’s rejec­tion of Churchill was based on the British jail­ing and tor­ture of his grand­fa­ther, Hus­sein Onyango Obama, between 1949 and 1951, “dur­ing the Mau Mau rebel­lion in Kenya”?  —R.P.

First, the Daily Tele­graph did not con­nect Obama’s grandfather’s jail­ing with the Mau Mau rebel­lion. The Tele­graph report is very care­ful on this point:

It was dur­ing Churchill’s sec­ond pre­mier­ship that Britain sup­pressed Kenya’s Mau Mau rebel­lion. Among Kenyans allegedly tor­tured by the colo­nial regime included one Hus­sein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather.

Pre­sum­ably it will now get round that the President’s grand­fa­ther was a Mau Mau rebel. But Town­hall colum­nist Diana West explodes the whole busi­ness. West explains that the tor­ture alle­ga­tion stems from a blog site, and/or Obama’s “Granny Sarah” (who also claimed that Barack was born in Kenya, which would make him inel­i­gi­ble to be Pres­i­dent). West continues:

In his Dreams of My Father, Obama describes his grandfather’s deten­tion as last­ing “over six months” before he was found inno­cent (no men­tion of tor­ture).  What­ever the case, Churchill didn’t become prime min­is­ter for the sec­ond time until the end of 1951. The Mau Mau Rebel­lion didn’t begin until the end of 1952, one year after Obama’s grandfather’s release.

Mr. Obama, an intel­li­gent man, prob­a­bly appre­ci­ates that the Par­lia­men­tary forms finally emerg­ing in Kenya stem from the colo­nial British, as they do in much of the old Empire, notably India and what Churchill called the “Great Domin­ions.” To para­phrase Mark Steyn (whose bust will prob­a­bly never adorn the President’s office either), imag­ine how Kenya might have devel­oped if it had been col­o­nized by, say, the Ger­mans, Japan­ese or Russians.

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