Now this is strange. What compels a Speaker of the House, as he's (supposed to be) trying to reach a deal to preserve various expiring government goodies before Congress recesses for the year, to move a resolution that would "commission the placement of a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Capitol"? Here he is, talking about it, softly crying, of course, but not in full Boehner Bawl mode. Winston Churchill, he was one helluva a guy. Anyway, this is all about race. 
 
 The reason Boehner and Co. are doing this is not merely because they admire Winston Churchill's speech before Congress 70 years ago. It's more the climax of a nearly three-year right-wing crusade against Barack Obama, whom they believe got rid of a White House bust of Winston Churchill upon assuming office in a fit of uppity anti-colonial rage. It all goes back to this Telegraph article from February 2009, which your creepy survivalist uncle almost certainly has bookmarked: 
 
 A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back. The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure. But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust for a further four years, the White House said: "Thanks, but no thanks." [...] Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather. 
 
 A White House spokesperson, though, had a less hysterical account, noting that "the Churchill bust was removed before Obama's inauguration as part of the usual changeover operations, adding that every president puts his own stamp on the Oval Office." But the legend of Obama angrily tossing out Sir Winston as his first act of revenge against whitey's colonial crimes has persisted, and it's finally slinked its way into a resolution on the House floor. 
 
 Now we'll have to move on to, say, the resolution demanding Obama stop putting his filthy feet on Queen Victoria's desk. Anything that reminds him that he is a guest in this office, in more ways than most. ||||| Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images 
 
 On Wednesday, newly minted British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that former London mayor Boris Johnson is joining her government as foreign secretary. 
 
 The notoriously wild-haired Johnson is a controversial pick for a few reasons, not least among them that he made no bones about his distaste for outgoing Conservative prime minister David Cameron, whose government he faulted for inducing “a kind of hysteria, a contagious mourning” in the wake of the Brexit referendum. 
 
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 But Johnson also has a track record of questionable statements and a penchant for insult directed at other foreign leaders and countries—many of whom will presumably occupy the majority of his time and energy as foreign secretary. 
 
 So to congratulate him on his new job, here’s a quick and far-from-comprehensive tour of some of Johnson’s most objectionable quips, writings, and remonstrations in the realm of foreign policy. 
 
 In 2003, Johnson described U.S. President George W. Bush as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who [epitomizes] the arrogance of American foreign policy” in an unsigned editorial in the Spectator. 
 
 In a 2005 Telegraph column, he wrote “…compared with the old British Empire, and the new American imperium, Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase….Chinese culture seems to stay firmly in China. Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms…. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, though there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech.” Three years later, Chinese media decried him as “arrogant, rude and disrespectful” when accepting the Olympic flag from China during the 2008 games: 
 
 In a 2006 column, also for the Telegraph, Johnson wrote “For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.” After backtracking furiously, he said he would “add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.” 
 
 Last December, he advocated joining forces with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying it is not “morally impossible” to work with them to defeat ISIS. 
 
 In an op-ed published in April, he claimed President Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office upon assuming the presidency in 2009 because “it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” comments several leading British members of Parliament (rightly) condemned as racist. 
 
 In May, he claimed top prize in a Spectator magazine poetry competition challenging contestants to pen offensive lyrics about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a limerick that referred to Erdogan as “a terrific wankerer” and imagined him having intercourse with a goat. Cheeky. 
 
 He’s also ripped into the EU, lambasting its trade and tariff policies and comparing its continent-unifying aspirations to Napoleon Bonaparte’s nineteenth-century attempts at European domination and Adolf Hitler’s vision of German expansionism: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” he said in a May interview with the Telegraph. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.” 
 
 And regardless of which way the U.S. presidential election tips come November, Johnson seems to have rankled both presumptive nominees in equal measure. During Hillary Clinton’s first run for the White House, in 2007, Johnson referred to her as “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital,” criticizing her for embodying “purse-lipped political correctness,” and reviving a long-discredited conspiracy theory that claims she and then-President Bill Clinton conspired to murder Vince Foster, a close friend and White House aide who committed suicide in 1993. 
 
 And in March, Johnson said he’s “genuinely worried” that Donald Trump will be elected president. That happened after Johnson was apparently mistaken for the business mogul during a trip to New York. “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump,” he said.
– President Obama has a "Dear Friends" op-ed in the Telegraph Friday in which he makes his case that Britain should remain in the European Union. After stressing the long-held ties between the US and the UK—"the tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries are a silent testament to just how intertwined our prosperity and security truly are"—Obama writes that "now is a time for friends and allies to stick together." One person clearly not on board is London Mayor Boris Johnson, who wrote a blistering response in the Sun newspaper. He says he admires the US and has "respect" for Obama, but thinks the White House view is off base. "It is incoherent. It is inconsistent, and yes it is downright hypocritical," writes the mayor. "The Americans would never contemplate anything like the EU, for themselves or for their neighbors in their own hemisphere. Why should they think it right for us?" In revving up his argument, Johnson also complains that a bust of Winston Churchill displayed in the Oval Office for nearly 10 years was removed from its perch "on day one of the Obama administration" and given back to the British embassy in Washington. He writes that it's unclear whether Obama was to blame but adds, "Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire." (The Washington Post in 2015 dug into the "complicated story" of the bust.) See Obama's full op-ed here, and Johnson's here.