My nomination for this is the repulsive English historian David Irving, the Holocaust “minimizer” and loony rightist, who, like Vidal, is a brilliant man whose mind has warped into bile. Like Vidal’s hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Irving’s loathing for Winston Churchill is simply perverse. Irving has just produced the epic second volume of his biography of Churchill, a book he claims to have spent 27 years researching. According to this early review, the book is a mish-mash of tired old myths and sinister paranoia. Irving at one point says that Churchill “invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his own country and its empire,” as if, in the battle against Hitler, such conflicts were anything but distant irrelevances. He thinks it pertinent to write that Churchill was of “partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted.” He also asserts that Churchill “was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war.” As Andrew Roberts puts it, in this ludicrous statement, Irving “is deliberately ignoring the evidence of dozens of the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for human civilization to survive and prosper.” Amen.
THIS JUST IN: “PROPOSAL IS LATEST U.S. REACTION TO CONCERNS THAT WAX AND WANE.” – The New York Times, today.
OLD LABOUR STRIKES BACK: Here’s something even Tony Blair can’t spin. His deputy prime minister, John Prescott, punched a protestor on the face yesterday, attacking him for throwing an egg. Or did he? Most pictures of the punch show a clear swipe by the old working class lefty turned modern centrist. But the government-run BBC, which is dubbed by some in London the Blair Broadcasting Company, quickly substituted a photo in its online edition that made Prescott look the victim. Bystanders insist Prescott threw the first punch. Who you going to believe? Tony Blair’s pet media organ or your own lying eyes?
The Dish 