MSNBC Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Misquotes: “At your throat or your feet”

21 May 2015 Comments 4 Comments

The Huffington Post reports that the National Memo’s Joe Conason criticized Joe Scarborough’s ambivalent attitude toward the Clintons by misquoting Churchill: “It’s what he said about the Hun, which is, ‘They’re either at your feet or at your throat.'”

“You just used a Winston Churchill quote to compare me to a Nazi because you don’t like the facts,” Scarborough replied.

“No, I didn’t compare you to a Nazi,” said Conason. “He wasn’t talking about the Nazis, he was talking about World War I. [The Huns] were not Nazis.”

Ah, all Huns are not Nazis, but in Churchill’s context, most Nazis were Huns!…

“Winston” Olbermann and the Healthcare Debate

19 October 2009 Comments 1 Comment

N.B.: If Mr. Olbermann had done more research, he would know what Churchill did say about national healthcare, which is more to the point: see Churchill and Healthcare.

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.

What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).

In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill

equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies.…