Somewhat complicating our understanding of the incident is the fact that even as George W. Bush may have retained the knickknacks of that same civilization, the 43rd president did more to break with it maybe than any previous president, certainly more than any previous Republican president. Yes, he ordered the military to war upon attack by Islamic terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, to fight ill-defined "extremism." But Bush was first and always an internationalist, a globalist, with no national calling, for example, to stem the massive illegal Hispanic influx that has transformed large swaths of the United States by replacing their Western, English-speaking heritage with a Third World, Spanish-speaking culture.

In countless ways, President Obama is merely extending and expanding policies already initiated by his predecessor. From securing the border, which neither man has considered a priority, to securing a Palestinian state, which both men have considered a priority, to a shared belief in bailout packages that are nationalizing the economy, a neutered lexicon with which to address Islam, and legalizing millions of illegal aliens, there is in both leaders a transformational impulse, intensified and now recognized as radicalism in Obama's case. Does this Bush-Obama nexus represent the place where what we once called "white guilt" and "black rage" overlap? It's possible.

In the end, Bush kept Churchill in the room with him, perhaps to mollycoddle the Right. From the beginning, Obama did not, perhaps to avoid being mistaken for a "sellout." I refer to the new president's concern as expressed in his first memoir where he wrote about his maneuvering as an undergraduate at Occidental College:

"To avoid being mistaken for such a sellout, I chose my friends carefully: the more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist professors and structural feminists, and punk rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Euro-centrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet, or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting Bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated."

Maybe he still is. Only now Barack Obama is taking that "alienation" out on the nation. Increasingly, this is how I interpret President Obama's open, aggressive war on capitalism that is designed to wrest control of the economy from the private sector and transfer it to the government. I call that Marxism. Like the symbolic repudiation of Churchill, Obama's Marxist attack on free markets plays to the same factions of the radical left he once set out to ingratiate himself with as a young man.

"When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife," wrote Frantz Fanon, the seminal theorist of anti-Western Third Worldism Obama mentioned above. When a Marxist, Third World-tilting president of the United States sees a bust of Winston Churchill, he sends it packing. He may have proven once again to the Left that he's no sellout, but that doesn't mean he hasn't just alienated an awful lot of the American people.