Charles Krauthammer Demands An Apology

For a thoroughly gratuitous, knee-jerk smear from the White House. Well, smearing is just about the only talent that Obama has at his disposal. Of course, Obama could blame Valerie Jarrett for the unnecessary insult to the British. Everyone knows that she's the real president.

The story of the bust dates to the early days of Obama's presidency in 2009, when he returned a Churchill bust to the British Embassy that had been loaned to the Bush administration and which sat in the Oval Office. The British Embassy offered to renew the loan, but Obama refused--leading to speculation as to what the cause of his apparent animus towards Britain might be. Some speculated that it might be resentment about the "fact" that his grandfather had been tortured by the British in Kenya--one of many colorful details about Obama's biography that turned out not to be true. The reality was more mundane: Obama sought to downplay any notion of a "special relationship" with Britain--especially one connected to the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

Three-and-a-half years later, Krauthammer referred to the bust incident in a column about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's trip abroad, and the White House suddenly unleashed a furious response, calling the Churchill bust story "100% false," and including a photograph of Obama supposedly showing off the bust to British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. But Pfeiffer's version of events--and Carney's--did not match the facts as they became known in 2009, and journalists and bloggers went digging for the truth.

Breitbart News' John Sexton unearthed a photograph of the returned bust in the British Embassy in 2009. ABC News' Jake Tapper confirmed that there are in fact two Churchill busts: one permanently in the White House as a gift, the other temporarily in the White House as a loan--which was indeed returned to the British Embassy in 2009. Pfeiffer then added an update to his statement on the White House blog, in which he acknowledged that one bust had been returned: it "was removed by the curator’s office, as is common practice at the end of every presidency," he claimed. And yet the fact remained, as Krauthammer points out in his response to Pfeiffer, that the British Embassy had offered to extend the loan, and Obama had refused.