Comparisons: American Thinker’s Robert Morrison was Not Thinking
In a May 10th piece on the American Thinker website, author Robert Morrison asserts that a) President Obama is no Churchill; b) Hitler, who in 1940 was ready “to parachute 10,000 commandos on London,” was rather scarier than Osama bin Laden; c) Obama, who dislikes Churchill for the torture of his grandfather in Kenya, “tossed” the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office; and d) “spilt his guts” to the media about the OBL operation.
Quoting Churchill’s famous remark that when he became Prime Minister he felt as if he “were walking with destiny,” Morrison writes: “I want my president to have concerns, but not fears. I don’t want him to go on television and kvetch. I want my president to walk with destiny.” Among the comments to this article is one asserting that Churchill and President Wilson “orchestrated a plan” to get America into World War I by sinking the liner Lusitania.
Dear oh dear…..
Please, Mr. Morrison…
For writers to offer comparisons of today’s politicians with Winston Churchill is remindful of what Churchill said (drawing laughs) to the U.S. Congress in 1941, just after the Japanese had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor: “They have certainly embarked upon a very considerable undertaking.”
As reported here, Obama actually has more Churchilliana than Bush had. And Obama alluded favorably to Churchill (albeit inaccurately) during the debate about waterboarding OBL’s followers at Guantanamo. Also, Obama’s grandfather left gaol in Kenya before Churchill returned to power in 1951. And Churchill actually expressed sympathy toward the Kenyan rebels. The details are on this site.
But kvetching and the current incumbent aside, you simply don’t parachute 10,000 commandos on a city, a feat beyond even Hitler’s Luftwaffe. For years we knew that during World War I the British shipped arms on passenger liners. But Churchill and Wilson did not set up RMS Lusitania to be torpedoed. No, they did not withdrew a naval escort. No they did not order a course that magically put the ship in the crosshairs of the U-20. Apparently we’re supposed to believe they knew where all the U-boats were, too.
The Lusitania nonsense was refuted years ago by Professor Harry Jaffa in the book Statesmanship (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), and further demolished in my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What He Actually Did and Said.
2 thoughts on “Comparisons: American Thinker’s Robert Morrison was Not Thinking”
I am unequipped to comment on the A.T.; my interest is in accuracy about Churchill. Like their writer I preferred Reagan’s handling of the Achille Lauro gangsters to the recent PR blitz, so I asked a friend who contracts with a “firm” in Virginia if he thought Obama had gone overboard. He replied: “It’s greatly exaggerated. Given the nature of my work I can’t go into detail, but simply put, this is a modern war of Information Operations in which their chief weapon is political, so broadly trumpeting the death of OBL removes this weapon and one of their primary recruitment tools.”
What happened to The American Thinker? It used to run pretty solid, conservative oriented thought pieces. It had been a while since I read it, but it appears to have degenerated into a dumping ground of careless, crackpot conspiracy pieces written by nonentities who couldn’t get published at anything remotely resembling even mainstream websites.