Obama Disses Brits, Will Media Miss?

Winston Churchill was one of history's greatest men, and for this Kenyan Clown to dishonor the memory of the first foreigner named by Congress as an honorary American citizen is another shameful chapter in Mr. Obama's already disgraceful occupancy of the White House.

From Martin Gilbert's Churchill and America:

It was from the United States that Churchill received his last high honor: honorary citizenship of the United States. Pressed for tenaciously by Kay Halle, a friend of both the Churchills and the Kennedys, it was proclaimed by President Kennedy on 9 April 1963. Because Churchill was not well enough to cross the Atlantic, Randolph received the honor on his father's behalf during a ceremony at the White House. Among the guests was ninety-two-year-old Bernard Baruch, with whom Churchill had worked closely in the First World War, and Averell Harriman, with whom he had worked closely in the Second. Kennedy's words encapsulated Churchill's achievement. "In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone," Kennedy declared, "and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life — he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."
Churchill, in London, watched the ceremony on television. In his message of acceptance, which was read out by Randolph, he referred to the Anglo-American theme that had been so much a part of his energies for more than six decades: "I am, as you know, half American by blood, and the story of my association with that mighty and benevolent nation goes back nearly ninety years, to the day of my father's marriage." In "this century of storm and tragedy," he said, "I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together and because of that fact the free world now stands." Of his new honor, the first honorary citizenship to be granted by the Congress of the United States to a foreigner, Churchill declared: "Mr President, your action illuminates the theme of unity of the English-speaking peoples to which I have devoted a large part of my life."
...
Churchill was buried in Bladon churchyard, near Blenheim Palace, where he had been born, in a grave next to those of his English father and American mother. That same day, more than three thousand miles away, sixty people gathered in the rose garden of Franklin Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park on the Hudson, where Churchill had so often been a guest. They were there to mark the eighty-third anniversary of Roosevelt's birth. At that very moment, in Churchill's honor, the Liberty Bell in New York's Middle Collegiate Church, which had tolled the inauguration and death of all American Presidents since George Washington, tolled ninety-one times: ninety for the years of Churchill's life, and one more in recognition of his lifelong links and friendship with America and the Americans. (pp. 447-449, my emphasis added)

Poor old Neville Chamberlain - his name has become synonymous with defeatism and cowardice. What so many forget when he waved that piece of paper after Munich is that most of the crowd cheered like crazy. Churchill was kinder:

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.”

Winston S Churchill

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