"Ring the bell. School's in ..."

Maureen must have gotten her column turned in early this week.

As Mr. Obama said in his news conference, it is in moments of crisis that a country must cleave to its principles. Asserting that “waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said he had been struck by an article describing how Churchill would not torture prisoners even when “London was being bombed to smithereens.”

“And the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people,” he said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”

Class dismissed.

Seems she didn't get the "Three Mansions in London" Churchill update that -- if you believe in playing those games and following them out to their "logical" conclusions -- would seemingly suck in plenty of wartime leaders who decided differently than the academics evaluating in softer times: "Was Churchill a war criminal?"*

As if we want to go down those paths... Ai-yi-yi-I!

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For an extra-credit side paper, discuss how the actions of the Black and Tans might fit into the no-torture revisionist spin that would have US policy seeking to emulate ... Britain.

(Cause you can never have too much schooling afterall.)