During a Fox News broadcast last week, a conservative panelist accused President Barack Obama of being a “Neville Chamberlain” figure, when it comes to confronting Muslim extremists.<\/p>\n
Chamberlain, of course, was the British Prime Minister in the 1930s whose efforts to appease and mollify Adolph Hitler put him squarely on the wrong side of history.<\/p>\n
Conservatives have worked aggressively to characterize Mr. Obama as a leader cut from the same cloth and blinded to the threat of Islamic radicalism by his own religious and racial sympathies.<\/p>\n
(For the record, Mr. Obama is a Christian, born in Hawaii, and was raised for most of his childhood in a white household by his white mother.)<\/p>\n
A regular theme on Fox News is the claim that the President’s first act after taking the oval office was to return to Britain a statue of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a figure lionized by the right.<\/p>\n
Glenn Beck and others have argued that the gesture was a repudiation of Britain’s Colonial history, a sign of Mr. Obama’s preference for the dark-skinned peoples once oppressed by Mr. Churchill’s empire.<\/p>\n
Responding to this kind of nonsense is tedious, but I think it’s also important.<\/p>\n
In this case — as is so often true when wrestling far-right conspiracy theories — the claims are almost perfectly Orwellian, in the sense that they don’t just fudge the truth. They actually turn truth on its head.<\/p>\n
First, a bit of history.\u00a0 It’s true, of course, that Neville Chamberlain was a pacifist to the point of recklessness prior to World War 2.<\/p>\n
But it often goes unmentioned that he was leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.\u00a0 And like Chamberlain, most American conservatives of the 1930s were staunchly pacifist and isolationist.<\/p>\n