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LET'S START WITH the words of Chris Matthews himself. In 2006, Churchill fan Matthews was invited to speak at Westminster College, the Fulton, Missouri school where Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946. Matthews chose as his topic "The Ten Lessons of Winston Churchill." Lesson number six, he said, (marking it with capital letters) was as follows:

"STUDY HISTORY! STUDY HISTORY! STUDY HISTORY!"

He then quoted Churchill approvingly as saying: "The farther back you can look, the farther forward you can see." Exactly. So to answer Matthews' questions to Mr. James, and why they are frighteningly relevant to charges that Senator Obama and his supporters like Matthews are perceived as appeasers, let's go back to the 1930s.

First, the definition of "to appease" as provided by The Random House Webster's College Dictionary: "to appease is to make anxious overtures and often undue concessions to satisfy someone's demands." Webster's also suggests appeasement is "to yield to the demands of in conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of one's principles."

There were any number of precise reasons why Winston Churchill believed Chamberlain and his predecessor were guilty of appeasement. He was, for example, appalled at the reluctance to fund British military preparedness. This is the 1930s British version of modern Democrats in America opposing the Reagan-era buildup or refusing funding for today's troops in Iraq. Indeed, the struggle between Churchill and his foes Baldwin and Chamberlain suggests nothing more than what has become a seemingly eternal struggle between a Reagan, either Bush or a McCain versus a Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry or Obama.