Hey, Roger Marshall, that wasn’t Ewing Kauffman who pulled Britain through the Blitz

Roger Marshall has a medical degree, but he doesn’t seem to have minored in history.

Sunday morning, Kansas’ junior senator tweeted an enthusiastic but factually-challenged guided video tour of a Kansas City landmark.

“This has to be one of the most fun, exciting cities in America,” said Marshall, as he gestured to the Country Club Plaza behind him.

Then he turned to a famous artwork across the street from the InterContinental — “the statues behind me commemorating Ewing Kauffman and his wife, Marion, just great fixtures in this community that really put the Kansas City Royals on the map in so many ways.”

Uh, no. He’s surely right about the Kauffmans’ contribution to Kansas City’s civic life, but he must not have read the plaque right there with the well-known sculpture. Which every tourist who ever visited the Plaza knows about, but Marshall does not.

Married Love, the beloved bronze at the intersection of Wornall Road and Ward Parkway, depicts not the Royals founder and his wife Muriel (not Marion), but Sir Winston and Lady Clementine Churchill.

True, the Kauffmans are more likely candidates for Kansas City honors than the Churchills. But Missouri has a special affinity for the British prime minister, dating back to his unexpected acceptance of an invitation to Westminster College in tiny Fulton in 1946. There, he delivered his historic “Sinews of Peace” speech, widely viewed as the opening volley in the Cold War.

“Boy, if you’ve never been to Kansas City, it has to be one of the funnest cities to come to,” said Marshall in the now-deleted video (captured for posterity by a quick-thinking Twitter user who saved it). You can’t argue that things aren’t “funnest” here, though it would have been nice if he’d clarified to his nationwide audience that he was in Missouri, not his home state of Kansas.

(Did he know he was in Missouri and not Kansas? Odd, him doing a tourism promotion for a state not his own, though there’s nothing wrong with that.)

Kansas Citians can be touchy about the common misconception that because “Kansas” is in our name, we must be located in that state. That’s why many performance venues here put up signs backstage warning touring artists not to butter up the crowd by saying how swell it is to be in Kansas.

If Marshall gets the little things so wrong, and with such confidence, how can we trust him to get the big things right?