Breaking: Margaret Thatcher passes away

[Valin]

Hot Air:

Ed Morrissey

4/8/13

 

Margaret Thatcher, the legendary Iron Lady of the United Kingdom, has passed away after suffering a stroke. So far, CNN only has a banner headline carrying the announcement from her spokewoman, but more will undoubtedly be coming.

 

Update: CNN has its news report live now:

 

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died Monday following a stroke, her spokeswoman confirmed.

 

Britain’s only female prime minister, Thatcher served from 1979 to 1990 as leader of the Conservative Party. She was called the “Iron Lady” for her personal and political toughness.

 

ABC News has more:

 

Margaret Thatcher, the first woman ever to serve as prime minister ofGreat Britain and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century has died at age 87.

 

“It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” Lord Timothy Bell said today. “A further statement will be made later.” …

 

Many considered her Britain’s Ronald Reagan. In fact, Reagan and Thatcher were political soul mates. Reagan called her the “best man in England” and she called him “the second most important man in my life.” The two shared a hatred of communism and a passion for small government. What America knew as “Reaganomics” is still called “Thatcherism” in Britain.

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[Valin]

Maggie at her best!!

 

 

 

Edited April 8, 2013 by Valin
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[righteousmomma]

Yes, I just posted the sad news in the Coffee Shop.

She brought great credit to everything she did and everyone she met.

 

[Geee]

Truly deserves to rest in the arms of the Lord. The world could use another Margaret Thatcher today.

[Valin]

More Here

[Ghost]

A remarkable lady. Class and Intelligence joined with determination and selfless honorable goals. What we would do for a leader such as this in our country. Have followed her career and retirement with interest and simply adored the movie Iron Lady. Have the Blu Ray and have watched it frequently as well as three times at theater. Thanks for the thread Valin

[Valin]

I want to believe they are together again....getting ready to cause someone trouble somewhere.

[Valin]

The Left

Classy as always!!!

 

[Valin]

Yes, I just posted the sad news in the Coffee Shop.

She brought great credit to everything she did and everyone she met.

 

 

Sad?

"“O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?"

1 corinthians 15 55

 

She gets to go home...and we're still stuck here.

For the Believer death is a graduation ceremony...we graduate into Real Reality...not the (as CS Lewis put it) Shadowland we in now.

 

 

[righteousmomma]

I know, Valin. She was a Methodist Christian. A believer.

Sad was not for her going home but for us in a world without her.

[Valin]

I know, Valin. She was a Methodist Christian. A believer.

Sad was not for her going home but for us in a world without her.

 

But her (political) Daughters are around. causing all manner of trouble.

 

 

 

[Pepper]

One less class act in the world today. RIP.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

One of England's last great PMs. RIP!

[mozartlover]

 

 

[Valin]

One of England's last great PMs. RIP!

 

Were are having the same arguments today.

[Geee]

@mozartlover. Seeing those classy dressed pics of the PM and the former first lady just brings to mind the embarrassment of the current occupant

[mozartlover]

@mozartlover. Seeing those classy dressed pics of the PM and the former first lady just brings to mind the embarrassment of the current occupant

 

Yup. It was nice when there were grown-ups in charge..

[Valin]

@mozartlover. Seeing those classy dressed pics of the PM and the former first lady just brings to mind the embarrassment of the current occupant

 

Yup. It was nice when there were grown-ups in charge..

 

 

"Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my red chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved ... the Iron Lady of the Western World."

Margaret Thatcher Jan. 31, 1976.

[Valin]

MSNBC host: Thatcher embodied selfishness and greed

Ed Morrissey

4/8/13

 

Allahpundit warned in the breaking-news post that the passing of Margaret Thatcher would probably not generate much graciousness on the Left. MSNBC proved him prophetic almost immediately, as NRO’s Eliana Johnson captured in this clip. Martin Bashir immediately launched into an attack on Thatcher as the embodiment of “selfishness and greed,” and managed to offer a quote that Thatcher probably would have enjoyed, considering the sources:

 

(before posting this video let me just say I really dislike Martin Bashir. If I were ever to meet him...I'd be in the papers the next day, charged with assault & battery.)

 

 

 

(Snip)

 

Update: As an antidote to Bashir, let’s hear from Andrew Sullivan about what Britain was really like — and how Thatcher changed everything:

 

To put it bluntly: The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete. …

 

She was, in that sense, a liberator. She didn’t constantly (or even ever) argue for women’s equality; she just lived it. She didn’t just usher in greater economic freedom; she unwittingly brought with it cultural transformation – because there is nothing more culturally disruptive than individualism and capitalism. Her 1940s values never re-took: the Brits engaged in spending and borrowing binges long after she had left the scene, and what last vestiges of prudery were left in the dust.

 

Perhaps in future years, her legacy might be better seen as a last, sane defense of the nation-state as the least worst political unit in human civilization. Her deep suspicion of the European project was rooted in memories of the Blitz, but it was also prescient and wise. Without her, it is doubtful the British would have kept their currency and their independence. They would have German financiers going over the budget in Whitehall by now, as they are in Greece and Portugal and Cyprus. She did not therefore only resuscitate economic freedom in Britain, she kept Britain itself free as an independent nation. Neither achievement was inevitable; in fact, each was a function of a single woman’s will-power. To have achieved both makes her easily the greatest 20th century prime minister after Churchill.

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[Geee]

Thatcher's Enduring Success Came From Her Principles

 

 

Thatcher's Iron Legacy

In the late 1970s, it didn't seem possible for one man to save Britain from socialism, win the Cold War, and revitalize the free world's military will. And it wasn't. It took a woman.

It was the Soviet Army's newspaper, all the way back in 1976, that first called Margaret Thatcher, the three-times-elected British prime minister who died Monday, "Iron Lady," believing it to be an insult.

As Tory leader, Thatcher had, just days earlier, delivered her "Britain Awake" speech, accusing James Callaghan's socialist government of "dismantling our defenses at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war."

Condemning the footsy that the Labor government's defense minister was playing with the Kremlin, Thatcher mused that "perhaps some people in the Labor Party think we are on the same side as the Russians!"

And she charged that Britain's global decline from her days ruling a quarter of the world was the partly-avoidable "result of our economic decline accelerated by socialism."

Wearing what she called "my Red Star chiffon evening gown," named after that Soviet newspaper, she happily embraced the Iron Lady title at a speech to her parliamentary constituency a few days after the Russians bestowed it on her.

But when Google News runs "Meryl Streep reacts to Margaret Thatcher's death" as its website's second headline, it's a reminder that today too many citizens who are free thanks to Thatcher and her kind are made of fluff rather than iron.

Iron Lady was far more than a colorful label. The times cried out for principle and seriousness, and a masculine version of a British leader as unbending as Thatcher could not have survived as PM for more than a decade, or boasted her achievements.

 

 

 

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/040813-651080-margaret-thatcher-saved-uk-from-obamas-vision.htm

[Geee]

Thatcher's Great Legacy: Burying Socialism And Reviving Free Markets

By GEORGE F. WILL

 

She had the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe. So said Francois Mitterrand, the last serious socialist to lead a major European nation, speaking of Margaret Thatcher, who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance.

She had the smooth, cold surface of a porcelain figurine, but her decisiveness made her the most formidable woman in 20th-century politics, and England's most formidable woman since its greatest sovereign, Elizabeth I. Argentina's junta learned of her decisiveness after seizing the Falklands.

The British, too, learned. A Tory MP said, "She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag."

She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism.

Her program was sound money, laissez-faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other "vigorous virtues."

 

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/040813-651056-thatcher-brought-a-declining-britain-back-to-prosperity-and-respectability.htm

[Geee]

Margaret Thatcher, Friend Of Freedom, Did Not Go Wobbly

By LAWRENCE KUDLOW

 

Many profound and detailed admiration pieces will be written about the late Margaret Thatcher, and they'll be much deeper than this one. But I want to get on record with my own esteem for Thatcher, whose character, philosophy and achievements made her one of Britain's greatest prime ministers.

In the early 1990s, at a National Review conference on Maryland's Eastern Shore, I had the great honor to serve on an economics panel that Thatcher moderated. The topic was free markets and freedom, areas in which Thatcher made huge contributions, so I had a lot to live up to.

And how did it go? Well, following the discussion, I got to sit next to Thatcher during the luncheon. And she told me, "You know, Kudlow, you did rather well in that talk."

Naturally, I was thrilled.

Thatcher fought socialism in England and unyieldingly promoted the free-market views of Nobelists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. She stopped the destructive British labor unions dead in their tracks. With every bone in her body, she attempted to limit government by cutting spending and taxation. She opted for big-bang financial deregulation. And she put London back on the map as a world banking center.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/040813-651054-thatcher-fought-socialism-promoted-free-markets.htm

[Valin]

Margaret Thatcher, Friend Of Freedom, Did Not Go Wobbly

By LAWRENCE KUDLOW

 

Many profound and detailed admiration pieces will be written about the late Margaret Thatcher, and they'll be much deeper than this one. But I want to get on record with my own esteem for Thatcher, whose character, philosophy and achievements made her one of Britain's greatest prime ministers.

 

 

She was a leader, she knew what she believed and said so forthrightly. Not a lot of fingers in the wind with her.

3 strong leader (Thatcher, JPII, Reagan) all come on the stage at the same time...almost leads one to think there might be something this God business...but that's just crazy talk of course.

[Valin]

UK Telegraph: We’ve closed comments on all Thatcher stories due to vitriolic abuse

Guy Benson

 

One of the paper’s lefties practically begged his fellow travelers to behave themselves today. No sale, apparently:

 

Tony Gallagher @gallaghereditor

 

We have closed comments on every #Thatcher story today - even our address to email tributes is filled with abuse

3:50 PM - 08 Apr 13

 

 

Tony Gallagher @gallaghereditor

 

Many of the people blocked from comments on our #ThatcherCoverage appear to have clogged up my timeline with their foul abuse

 

 

[Valin]

UK Telegraph: We’ve closed comments on all Thatcher stories due to vitriolic abuse

Guy Benson

 

One of the paper’s lefties practically begged his fellow travelers to behave themselves today. No sale, apparently:

 

Tony Gallagher @gallaghereditor

 

We have closed comments on every #Thatcher story today - even our address to email tributes is filled with abuse

3:50 PM - 08 Apr 13

 

 

Tony Gallagher @gallaghereditor

 

Many of the people blocked from comments on our #ThatcherCoverage appear to have clogged up my timeline with their foul abuse

 

Inevitable: The Left Trashes Margaret Thatcher

 

(Snip)

George Galloway @georgegalloway

 

Tramp the dirt down.

12:08 PM - 08 Apr 13

 

 

Donna Brazile ✔ @donnabrazile

 

Okay, what did the #ironlady do to advance Great Britain and the world? Did she leave lasting footprints for women in politics? #justsayin

1:48 PM - 08 Apr 13

 

 

(Snip)

 

UPDATE - It should be noted that many generous and thoughtful well-wishes have poured in from center-left figures, from Presidents Obama and Clinton to Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

 

 

UPDATE II - Twitchy has a disturbing round-up of Thatcher hate, including street parties celebrating her death. Disgusting:

 

http://youtu.be/7QiZPoo7H90

 

 

 

Some of us will remember this....the next time the (expletive deleted) on the left bring up Civility.