Last March, when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress at the height of his re-election campaign, pundits heard clear, and clearly intentional, echoes of Winston Churchill in the speech warning against the Iranian nuclear deal.

"A Churchill for Our Times," read a title in the conservative National Review. Underscoring the parallel, a Washington Post headline noted that "Benjamin Netanyahu has now addressed Congress as many times as Winston Churchill."

The Post piece was illustrated with a bronze bust of Churchill, head canted in a heroic pose of dour indomitability – House Speaker John Boehner's gift to the prime minister.

Lest the comparison lay fallow, it was revived last week, when Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee toured Israel and West Bank settlements in an effort to boost his campaign.

"It was an honor to meet with my friend @netanyahu while in Jerusalem," Huckabee tweeted.

"He is a Churchill in a world full of Chamberlains."

But something else happened last week that in many ways encapsulated just how much Netanyahu has fallen short of the legacy of the wartime British leader – and just how closely Netanyahu has grown to emulate the lame-ass style and ass-backward substance of another pugnacious figure of world renown, Wile E. Coyote:

The government blew up a bridge.

It wasn't so much the actual explosive event, the breathlessly anticlimactic demolition of central Tel Aviv's landmark eye-sore Maariv Bridge, that recalled with such startling fidelity the Warner Brothers cartoons in which an obsessive but fundamentally clueless Coyote revels in and ultimately misuses destructive technology to fail at one aggressively pursued, self-defeating, scorched-earth offensive after another.

No, it was the ceremony which preceded it. Israelis by the droves who had woken at dawn to watch the demolition on live television, were treated to an empty podium – bare, that is, except for a last-century blasting detonator box and plunger straight out of the ACME Corporation mail-order catalogues so beloved of the Coyote.

When Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, one of the small handful of remaining Netanyahu loyalists within the Likud, finally showed up 20 minutes late to blow up the bridge – the first step toward a subway system itself eons in the delaying – his introductory remarks left little doubt as to what the Netanyahu legacy is really about.

"This explosion symbolizes hope and renewal," Katz said. "From this day on, there will be no turning back."

With the collapse of the bridge, Katz declared, in what functioned as a neat summary of the government's goals regarding the social democratic-based Israel of the past and the hard-right oriented Israel of the future, "This is a new history, which will replace the old history."

For the uninitiated - and for those curious about what makes Netanyahu, er, tick - cartoon genius Chuck Jones once said he based the character of Wile E. Coyote in part on a section of Mark Twain's travel memoir Roughing It.

In a long, vivid account, Twain describes the coyote's "despairing expression of forsakenness and misery He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry."

"He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it."

But Wile E. is not just any coyote, just as Benjamin N. is not just any politician. Both operate according to simple but strict rules, as the cartoon coyote's creator Chuck Jones suggested in a 1979 autobiography and a subsequent New York Museum of the Moving Image exhibition.

Among the applicable commandments:

"Rule 2: No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of ACME products."

"Rule 3: The Coyote could stop anytime – if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: 'A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim' – George Santayana)"

"Rule 9: The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures."

Not that any of this should come as a surprise to us. True, he promised the Israeli voter to be a Churchill against Iran, and turned out to be Wile E. Coyote.

But if we are surprised by any of this, we have only ourselves to blame. We watched him at the UN, year after year, did we not?

After all, if it acts like a Wile E. Coyote, if it pictures an ACME bomb like a Wile E. Coyote, if it concentrates on just one enemy obsessively and endlessly like a Wile E. Coyote, then what is it?

Is it the species of animal variously described in Looney Tunes Latin by names like Hardheadipus oedipus, or Nemesis ridiculii?

To paraphrase the prime minister's answer to a similar question in the course of his milestone 2012 "nuclear duck" speech to AIPAC,

"Well, it ain't a Churchill."