Thursday, April 30, 2009
"Huh?" moment of the day
Barack Obama, in last night's news conference:
"I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day, talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, we don't torture -- when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And the reason was that Churchill understood you start taking shortcuts, and over time that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."Um, no, but the British and their American allies did bomb and firebomb the smithereens out of German cities, killing 370,000 civilians. What on earth does Churchill's alleged decision not to torture 200 German POWs have to do with the bombing of London?
And, by the way, what can we say about the "character of the country" that was willing to drop an atomic bomb on two civilian cities?
