“What base ingratitude”

Winston Churchill was a magnanimous man of exemplary character, yet Stanley Baldwin tested his limits. As Richard Langworth recounts, Churchill held Baldwin responsible for Britain’s lack of preparedness to go to war with Germany when the crisis inevitably came. During the blitz, when informed that a German bomb had fallen on Baldwin’s house, Churchill quipped, “What base ingratitude.” (Martin Gilbert has a different version of the story in Finest Hour.)

Jay Solomon brought Churchill’s quip to mind with his Semafor story “Inside Iran’s influence operation.” Lee Smith drew on Solomon’s story for the blunter Tablet column “High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington.”

In her JNS column Caroline Glick sought to explain “What Iran’s penetration of Washington means.” JNS editor Jonathan Tobin stepped back to take a look at the big picture in “Who lost Iran?”

This week Adam Kredo followed up on Solomon’s story of Iranian penetration of the Obama/Biden regimes with “Member of Iranian Influence Network Visited Biden White House Five Times.” However, Solomon’s story appears not to have triggered the interest or penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream media.

There’s no one like Harvey Klehr — the foremost historian of American Communism and author (with John Haynes) of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America — but someone like Professor Klehr needs to take in what we know now and compare Iran’s penetration with the Communist ring that operated inside the Roosevelt administration.

UPDATE: Don’t miss Benjamin Weinthal’s Fox News/MEF column drawing on the invaluable MEMRI’s report: “Iran Official Admits Country’s Role in Terror Bombing That Killed 241 US Military Members.”