The backside of 10 Downing Street

Like a plot twist in a sitcom, IT TURNS OUT THERE ARE TWO CHURCHILL BUSTS!!!!! The one in the White House Residence was a gift to the White House from the British Embassy during the Nixon administration. The other one was loaned to President George W. Bush by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Says James Barbour, Press Secretary and Head of Communications for the British Embassy, “The bust of Sir Winston Churchill, by Sir Jacob Epstein, was lent to the George W Bush administration from the UK’s Government Art Collection, for the duration of the Presidency. When that administration came to an end so did the loan; the bust now resides in the British Ambassador’s Residence in Washington DC. The White House collection has its own Epstein bust of Churchill, which President Obama showed to Prime Minister Cameron when he visited the White House in March”

Uh oh, time to get all Nancy Drew up in this thing ... and a third Churchill bust, currently residing in a certain White House bathroom, contains a map showing the location of Lincoln's gold!

The White House is now admitting the error. Or is that just what they want you to think?

As backstory, the controversy around the Churchill Bust is that supposedly Barack Obama let the British have their bust back when the original loan of it had expired in order to pay them back for slavery or calling things "chips" or something, I don't remember the exact details, but yesterday Mitt Romney burnished his foreign policy credentials by telling a London crowd that when he was president, he'd take the Churchill bust back from the British and again display it proudly in the Oval Office (in the process banishing any remaining busts of communists Martin Luther King Jr. and Abe Lincoln, who I again point out were communists).

As a fabulously wealthy man, Mitt knows that returning things after the loan has expired is something only poor people do. Besides, our special relationship with the United Kingdom entitles us to keep all their stuff if we say we want it.

