From Magna Carta to the Arab Spring in under a half-hour

Pres. Obama's speech in Westminster Hall contained the soaring rhetoric one would have expected, and reading the text one can imagine it in delivery and even be moved at one or two points. There were at least a couple of things that jumped out: in one passage he equates "free enterprise" with "the market" (wrongly, I think); and the Roosevelt-Churchill chord is struck perhaps a bit too loudly at the end (don't Obama's speechwriters know about Churchill's view of the Empire? If Churchill had had his way, the British army, which Obama's grandfather, as the Pres. remarked, served as a cook in Kenya, would still be in Kenya). Still, it's hard to avoid Churchill-FDR in this context, and his speechwriters did manage to find a reasonably appropriate Churchill quotation -- something about 'the chirping bird of freedom' -- to end with.

The stuff about the U.S. and U.K. still being indispensable for leadership in the world etc. etc. is entirely predictable; what else could he say? This is not totally wrong, but even if it were he would still have had to say it. You can't get up in Westminster Hall and say "our power and influence are declining, let's decline gracefully, thank you very much." Well, I suppose you could, but you'd have to have really skilled speechwriters to make it go down.

The bust of Churchill; or, The Lamp of History and the Klieg Lights of Journalism

Judging from Dana Milbank's column in today's Wash Post ("No Colgate Moment, Indeed"), the journalistic consensus on both sides of the pond is that PM Gordon Brown, in his just-concluded visit, got a less-than-very-warm reception from Pres. Obama, compared at least to the precedents set by the Bush-Blair encounters. No joint press conference, no night at Camp David, and -- horrors! -- Obama sent back to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill lent by Blair to Bush and kept by the latter in the Oval Office. Obama and Brown also had a somewhat awkward-sounding exchange about the possibility of playing tennis sometime. (The world economy is melting down, and they're chatting about tennis. I know, a cheap shot.)

So, does any of this matter? Not really. Obama may not be an Anglophile, but I wouldn't be surprised if he knows at least a bit more about British history than Bush (that wouldn't be hard). Obama and Brown may not have the warmest rapport, but, again, so what? Bush and Blair, after all, had too close a rapport: they are forever linked in the public mind with the invasion of Iraq, which was not their finest hour, to put it mildly.

And as for returning the bust of Churchill: this is not, heaven knows, about Churchill. The bust was a loan to Bush from Blair. No wonder Obama is not eager to keep it around.

"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past," Churchill famously remarked in the House of Commons (November 12, 1940). On the other hand, journalism, often called the first draft of history, turns its indiscriminate flood lights on the present, bathing everything in a garish glow and producing mountains of ephemera, through which some future historians -- can anyone possibly envy them? -- will have to wade. Give us a break: let the bust of Churchill alone, and focus on something more consequential than whether the president and the prime minister use the same brand of toothpaste.