Like Bush, Chamberlain also laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the office of prime minister. He scorned dissenting views, both inside and outside government. When Chamberlain arranged his face-to-face meetings with Hitler in 1938 that ended in the catastrophic Munich conference, he did so without consulting his cabinet, which, under the British system, is responsible for making policy. He also bypassed the House of Commons, leading Harold Macmillan, a future Tory prime minister who was then an anti-appeasement MP, to complain that Chamberlain was treating Parliament "like a Reichstag, to meet only to hear the orations and to register the decrees of the government of the day."

[...]

Churchill, on the other hand, revered Parliament and was appalled by Chamberlain's determination to dominate the Commons in the late 1930s. Churchill considered himself first and foremost "a child" and "servant" of the House of Commons and strongly believed in the legislature's constitutional role to oversee the executive (even when, after becoming prime minister, he often railed against MPs who criticized him). In August 1939, when Chamberlain rammed through a two-month parliamentary adjournment just weeks before the war began, Churchill -- then still a backbencher -- exploded with anger in the House, calling the prime minister's move "disastrous," "pathetic" and shameful." He encouraged his anti-appeasement colleagues to mount similar attacks against Chamberlain, and when one of them, Ronald Cartland, called the prime minister a dictator to his face in the same debate, Churchill congratulated Cartland with an enthusiastic, "Well done, my boy, well done!"

Likewise, Churchill almost certainly would look askance at the Bush administration's years-long campaign to shut down public debate over the "war on terror" and the conflict in Iraq -- tactics markedly similar to Chamberlain's attempts to quiet his opponents. Like Bush and his aides, Chamberlain badgered and intimidated the press, restricted journalists' access to sources and claimed that anyone who dared criticize the government was guilty of disloyalty and damaging the national interest. Just as Bush has done, Chamberlain authorized the wiretapping of citizens without court authorization; Churchill was among those whose phones were tapped by the prime minister's subordinates.

Churchill, by contrast, believed firmly in the sanctity of individual liberties and the need to protect them from government encroachment. That's not to say that he was never guilty of infringing on them himself. In June 1940, when a Nazi invasion of Britain seemed imminent, he ordered the internment of more than 20,000 enemy aliens living on British soil, most of them refugees from Hitler's and Mussolini's fascist regimes. But as the invasion scare abated over the next few months, the vast majority were released, also by his order. "The key word in any understanding of Winston Churchill is the simple word 'Liberty,' " wrote Eric Seal, Churchill's principal private secretary during the early years of the war. "He intensely disliked, and reacted violently against, all attempts to regiment and dictate opinion. . . . He demanded for himself freedom to follow his own star, and he stood out for a like liberty for all men."

Honestly, I think the comparison works. Of course, that might just be because I'm looking for some modern day "troublesome young men" (and women) who will deliver the GOP from the Bush era.