George Orwell would have loved this one...

For those of you who didn't read the classic 1984, one of the things the main character Winston had to do was remake old photo's to change history. He would cut out people who had fallen from favor from group photos, etc.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, here we go again. From the July 19th edition of the National Review

At a London museum called Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Experience, the giant photo above the entrance shows a familiar image—Churchill decked out in a military uniform and making his famous V sign. But a closer look reveals that his mouth is twisted in an odd grin. A private Churchillian joke? No, just a clumsy job of airbrushing out Winnie’s everpresent cigar. Churchill thus becomes the latest victim of the U.K.’s army of health zealots, who evidently fear that the original image would create a new generation of hardened smokers. Did Britain’s servicemen sacrifice life and limb so their country could be transformed into a nation of fusspots? If so, America’s servicemen did too, since a statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt at his memorial in Washington has quite clearly had FDR’s trademark cigarette holder censored out. Joseph Stalin, who smoked a pipe and wielded a mean airbrush himself, would no doubt be amused; and decades from now, if we’re still around, we won’t be surprised to see a giant image of our current president glowering over the entrance to Barack Obama’s America in Default xperience and popping a Nicorette.

As an occasional cigar smoker I am offended at this....nothing beats a good Habana Reserve with a glass of Scotch after a long ass week to unwind. But as a free thinking man and an ardent admirer of the greatest Prime Minister Britain ever had this is disgusting. What next, are we going to paint over the pictures of the English troop's weapons, we don't want to think there was any fighting going on and guns are banned “Over There!”. I mean is a little historical revision that bad...

What next, will they air brush out the extermination camps too...oh right, they already are doing things like that...don't want to offend people (I guess Jews ain't in the "don't offend group")