Google famously tells the world: Don’t Be Evil. Good idea. There’s a lot of evil going around. Yesterday, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunnis decided to take their dispute with Shi’ites to a higher court when one of these votaries of the religion of peace entered a Shi’ite mosque and blew himself up, killing dozens of others. Evil. Pretty clearcut. But then there’s today’s Google logo. It’s a tribute to the 125th anniversary of Diego Rivera’s birth.

Check it out. I have a terrible confession. I like it. The guy’s art is appealing. His murals of Mexican peasants and industrial workers touch me. I love his bold, bright colors. My hero Winston Churchill said he planned to spend his first thousand years in heaven assaulting canvasses with nothing but the loudest, brashest of colors. So what’s the row about good old Diego? Well, the big Mexican folk artist (big in reputation, and 300 pounds big) was a big Communist. The Rockefellers kind of balked at his May Day mural featuring good old Vladimir Lenin leading the happy peasants and workers through Red Square. Lenin, it should be remembered, whose Communist Party card was Number One, refused to let his mistress play Beethoven piano sonatas for him; he didn’t want them to soften him. Lenin enjoyed, really got a rush out of picking up a telephone in his Kremlin office and ordering a thousand people shot in Vladivostok, 9,000 miles away from Moscow. Okay, so I can’t help liking Rivera’s art, minus Lenin. But here’s a link I felt honor-bound to consult. I doubt you’re going to see Nikolai Getman on the “Don’t Be Evil” corporate logo anytime soon. He’s unknown outside conservative circles. But I hope we will all check out his Gulag Collection. He doesn’t have as many bright colors as Diego Rivera.

Slave labor camps tend to be a bit monochrome. Look at Getman’s haunting paintings of zeks being shot, or forced to work in uranium mines, or even being staked out, Christ-like, on a tree to be attacked by swarms of Siberian mosquitos. So, feeling guilty about Diego Rivera reminded me to check out Nikolai Getman once again. Our heroes will never be the most popular. Their work will never be seen in Rockefeller Center. They will not be offered in exhibits in the National Gallery of Art. Their birthdays will not be celebrated by Google. But here’s a consolation. If you study Nikolai Getman’s Gulag Collection, you’ll have a leg up on not being evil.

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Trip Dyer, one of the brightest of all our FRC interns, challenged me when I told his class I thought Winston Churchill’s life was the most documented human life ever lived. Trip thought that it was likely that the present Prince William’s life has been better recorded. He may have had a point there.

We certainly didn’t have photographs of Winston’s minutes after his birth–seven months after his parents’ marriage–on this day in 1874. But we know he was born not in his parent’s fashionable London flat. Instead, after his mother’s riding mishap that day, he came into the world early. He was born at Blenheim Palace, the ducal estate of his famous Marlborough ancestors. They were not nearly so famous then as they would become. Winston would write four great volumes on the great Duke of Marlborough, who had defeated the armies of Louis XIV and who was a central figure in England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89. Many American Founders looked to that revolution as their model for our own.

Winston was intensely proud of his noble English forbears. But he was just as proud of his American antecedents. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was a beauty from New York, whose tycoon father owned the New York Times. Jennie’s ancestor was said to be Pocahontas. That American princess married an Englishman and captivated the royal court of her own day with her beauty and wit.

Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a reforming politician, a Tory democrat, who was on track to become Prime Minister before he rashly challenged his party leader, Prime Minister Salisbury. Like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Lord Randolph fell from the post of Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer–second highest in the House of Commons, never to rise again.

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It’s safe to say our relations with the British have probably never been worse in our lifetimes. Recall that just before he went to London and bowed to beheaders, the newly inaugurated President Obama let it be known he had returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. He might as well have tossed it out of the Oval Office into the snow.

Then, he gifted Her Majesty with, what else, recordings of all his speeches. He followed that up with the amazingly thoughtful gesture of bestowing on Prime Minister Gordon Brown a $29.95 collection of DVDs of Hollywood’s greatest films. Mr. Brown is doubtless enjoying them now, in his retirement, if he can get an adapter.

The “Special Relationship” fostered so carefully by the World War II alliance of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt is in tatters. The Obama State Department is happy to tell us that Britain is no more special to us than any of the other 192 countries in the UN. (Of course, President Obama is known to think the U.S. itself is no more exceptional than Britain, or even Greece.)

It was fairly easy to be the new broom sweeping clean – back in 2009. Now, however, as Rev. Wright might say, Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost. Along with his sagging approval numbers is coming increasing disrespect. Rep. Maxine Waters is asking permission from her constituents to take the president to the woodshed. Former backer Peggy Noonan briskly calls him a “loser” on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and asks aloud if he might just be “snakebit.”

The worst example of dissing the commander-in-chief, doubtless came from leftist Bill Maher. He told a nationwide audience, in an obscenity-laced routine, that he had been hoping for a president who would shoot the BP executives after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A short review of our Special Relationship might be in order. When Churchill crossed the U-boat infested North Atlantic seventy summers ago in the HMS Prince of Wales, he forged an alliance that lasted through World War II, the Cold War, all the way into the hills of Tora Bora, in Afghanistan and the oilfields of Basra in Iraq. Churchill, it was said in that 1941 First Summit, felt as if he was “going to meet God Almighty.” FDR’s son told the British Prime Minister his father thought him “the greatest man in the world.”

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Today is not a holiday in Britain. Or in the U.S.  Perhaps it ought to be. It’s Winston Churchill’s birthday. Churchill was born into another world. A month or more premature, young Winston breathed his first in the splendid Blenheim Palace, the ducal home of his famous Marlborough ancestors.

As much at home among titled English aristocrats as he was, Churchill also became the great commoner. All his life he defended democracy—the right of the people to govern themselves. And he boasted of his descent, on his American mother’s side, from the Indian princess Pocahontas.

One of the first acts of the Obama administration was to toss the bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office. And as for any idea of a Special Relationship between the U.S. and Britain, there was none. The British were no different, as far as this White House was concerned, than any of the other 189 members of the UN.

Before the Waste Management truck comes to cart off what remains of the Special Relationship, it might be a good idea to recall what it was and why it was important.

Prior to 1939, there was still a great deal of hostility toward England and all things English in this country. Students in American high schools then learned a lot about our revolutionary struggles against the British monarchy. They probably also learned about some of the cruelties of our estranged “mother” country.

At the famous Battle of Bunker Hill, redcoats finally took the heights after a furious fight. Boston Patriot leader Dr. Joseph Warren took part in that struggle. “Act worthy of yourselves,” Dr. Warren told his men, in words that Ronald Reagan would quote in his First Inaugural Address. Reagan would not remind Americans that the victorious redcoats presented Dr. Warren’s head to their general as a trophy, in an act that marked them as savages.

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I never wanted to be a fly on the wall. I saw the original Sci Fi cult classic, The Fly, and it gave me the creeps. A scientist was trying to enter his newly-invented transporter—you know, like the ones later made famous on Star Trek. He thought to have himself broken down to his atomic particles and reconstructed later, elsewhere. Except a fly got into the ointment. Our scientist friend came out, uh, changed.

I never wanted to be a fly on the wall, but I do admit I’d like to have had Inspector Walter Thompson’s job. Inspector Thompson spent nearly twenty years guarding the life of Winston Churchill. The Scotland Yard policeman got an unparalleled opportunity to observe greatness—up close and personal.

A friend just gave me a copy of Assignment: Churchill, Walter Thompson’s fascinating 1955 memoir. Thompson describes himself as “tough as a telegraph wire” as a young police officer. He had to be. Many a time, he waded in to hostile mobs and menacing would-be assassins.

One of eleven kids born in a London slum, “Tommy” Thompson dropped out of school at age 8 to help support his family. If this is how English grammar school dropouts can write, I suggest all English lads be put out at eight.

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