printThe one and only Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, passed away today of a stroke. She was 87. CNN led its piss-poor hourly programing—activism, really—with news about the death of mouseketeer Annette Funicello.
What comes immediately to my mind is that Margaret Thatcher stood for the gradualism of Ronald Reagan, when it came to delivering South Africa to the sainted Nelson Mandela’s communists. As noted on page 147 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”:
…public intellectuals … thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land.’
Tell me that fools are not attempting to redefine, à la postmodernism, the very definition of news. And why not? Academics have similarly broken down the ancient concept of the intellectual discipline.
“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)
Failing to lead the news with coverage of Mrs. Thatcher’s passing is in-itself big news.
UPDATE I: MSNBC’s odious Martin Bashir, a Briton, is dismembering Thatcher. His correspondent’s source of analysis: Meryl Creep’s depiction in “The Iron Lady.”
As I said, disciplinary breakdown.
Of course, many of Thatcher’s moves I‘d oppose, however it is undeniable that she was perhaps the only true great female leader other than old Golda Meir. I cannot think of a woman with a Thatcher-like intellect in international politics. Golda didn’t have that intellect, but she was quite the character. Both were nothing like today’s whiny, idiot fems.
UPDATE II: Don’t bother searching the articles penned by the presstitutes in the UK and the US, about Baroness Thatcher. Her remarkable oratory they call simple—to these cretins plain-spoken reason is counter-intuitive and hence, simplistic. The so-called 10 best quotes from Mrs. Thatcher’s are really stupid things said about her by her intellectual inferiors in Labor.
Here is Mrs. Thatcher displaying that incisive intellect of hers:
“…What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poorer were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”
Watch the above bit of parliamentary flyting as only the British can do, and tell me the woman was not brilliant. Even her opponent delights in her retort.
“I detest every one of her domestic policies,” the Member tells the PM. To which she replies without flinching, in that crisp beautiful English:
“The honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who’ve experienced it have.”
On the famous U-Turn:
“For those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catch phrase the U-Turn, I have only one thing to say: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.'”
The exchange below with the pompous Peter Mansbridge of CBC is particularly relevant to the empty talk about “compromise” infesting current debates:
What perturbs Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian institution in his own right—a stuffy, ossified, yet rather able lefty journo—is what he calls “the uncompromising style of Thatcherism.” A liberal doesn’t like a debate about substance, for it demands intellectual argument. Rather, the liberal is compelled to make silly points about style for those allow for an emotional approach (“Baroness, you make me feel bad; you hurt my self-esteem”).
Mrs. Thatcher offers up a gorgeous metaphor for the pursuit of truth: “When you’re starting a journey over the seas, you steer by stars that are always the same in the heavens. If you haven’t any stars to steer by, then it’s a pretty nondescript journey. …consensus doesn’t seem to be a very good star to steer by.”
Exquisite.
And Mrs. Thatcher’s coup de grâce: “Why are you so interested in compromise and consensus? Why are you not interested in having clear objectives; and having been elected on clear objectives, knowing full-well that the difficulties would emerge first and the benefits later?”