Margaret Thatcher’s granddaughter Amanda traveled to the funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral from her home in Texas. The younger Thatcher was elegantly composed and very decorative, and she delivered a fighting passage from St. Paul that caused the British media elite to squirm in discomfort.
Foreign Policy says Amanda Thatcher “stole the show” at Nargaret Thatcher’s funeral.
At Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, the Telegraph reports that expressions of appreciation and respect from the British public drowned out the unseemly expressions of animosity from churlish representatives of the left.
It seemed to come out of nowhere. No one knew who’d started it – perhaps it was purely instinctual. But as the hearse came into view, the crowds found themselves breaking into applause – applause that followed the hearse all the way along the route, until it drew up at the church of St Clement Danes.
Then, once the coffin had been loaded on to the gun carriage and the horses moved off, the applause started again – and followed it all the way to St Paul’s.
Down the roads it spread and spread and spread, a long impromptu chain of respect and appreciation.
The applause wasn’t rowdy; there were no whoops or whistles. It was steady, warm, dignified. But also, somehow, determined.
At Ludgate Circus, protesters began to boo and jeer – only to find the rest of the crowd applauding all the more loudly to drown them out.
The Thatcher funeral inevitably reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s. I remember the whole long route of the hearse to the grave-site far out into the hills, lined all the way with ordinary people, and even the television reportage filled with emotion. I remember in particular the cameras catching sight of one woman holding up a hand lettered sign, which seemed to me to sum up perfectly the feelings of most Americans. That sign read: “Well Done.”
London mayor and notorious bad boy Boris Johnson retorts to all the nasty little leftist toads who made a point of rejoicing publicly over the passing of Margaret Thatcher.
Ding dong, the Soviet Union is dead! Ding dong, communism is dead! And so is the British disease. They are all dead as doornails – the myth of this country’s inevitable decline, the habit of capitulating to the unions, the belief in state control of everything from motor manufacturers to removals firms, taxation rates at 98 per cent: all the Lefty nostrums of the post-war epoch.
Ding dong! Old Labour’s dead! The Labour Party has given up its ridiculous belief in the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange – the slogan that used to be printed on the back of every party membership card. Ding dong, Clause Four is dead as a dodo.
But I tell you what, my little Left-wing friends, and all you who think it amusing to break out the champagne at the death of an 87-year-old woman. There is one thing that is alive and well – and that is Thatcherism. Thatcherism lives; and will live as long as there are people in this country, and on this planet, who see how economic freedom can be the servant not just of the rich, but of our whole society.
Jennifer Rubin marks Margaret Thatcher’s passing by identifying the characteristic liberal ways of dealing with the passing of conservative giants.
At the passing of each conservative legend we are reminded that liberals stick to some basic rules when commenting on these passings. These rules of the road (of the funeral procession, if you will) are thoroughly predictable and the subject of much guffawing by conservatives, while liberals remain clueless that their act has gotten old:
1. The only good conservative is a dead one. …
10. Allow no self-reflection on why no liberal icon in the past 50-plus years is regarded with such affection and esteem.
Matthew Burke has collected twenty-five excellent quotations from Margaret Thatcher “that crush Obama and the left.”
Sample:
“When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality – other than equality before the law – that government poses a threat to liberty.†~ Margaret Thatcher
Richard Fernandez reminds us that we need to mourn not only Margaret Thatcher’s departure, but even more the failure of the Trans-Atlantic democracies to live up to, and properly value, the legacy of greatness of the three leaders who defeated Communism.
Margaret Thatcher will not be remembered for that minor conflict which we call the Falklands War. It will be for her role in the fall of the Soviet Union.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. To understand the challenge — to hear the question — is perhaps the greatest obstacle to greatness on history’s stage.
The great achievement of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope lay in remembering that Communism was an evil thing. By that time it was conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union was permanent. And therefore their revolutionary act consisted, in the first place, of understanding the question. The reply they gave was not remarkable, just what most of us would say had we known the interrogative.
The three were poorly instructed in the by-then perfected art of moral relativism. The archived punditry is full of jibes attacking their failure to understand that their human imperfections disqualified them from exercising judgment, or that the defects of their societies necessarily compelled them into inaction.
To the chagrin of the intelligensia, the three still thought in the obsolete categories of “oughts†and “shoulds,†in the distinction between the normative and the normal. Fortunately for the world, they understood that the mud of creation was not a bar to the quest for paradise.
If there was greatness in Thatcher, it lay in the ability to hear the signal hidden from those too obsessed with their own greatness. It lay in being able to see the fastball over home plate that nobody else could see. Clinton, who lived in the aftermath of Reagan, John Paul II, and Thatcher, approached the problem as a question of how to spend the Peace Dividend; as a matter of how to remake the world now that his predecessors had cleared the way for him.
And he hit the ball he saw out of the park. Too bad if it was the wrong ball and the wrong park.
But if he wasn’t listening to history, maybe it wasn’t listening to him. And that’s too bad. Perhaps no one truly attains greatness by believing “it is in me.†Everyone who eventually gets there reaches it in surprise.
What made Margaret Thatcher noteworthy will not lie with her in the coffin, either to praise or — as is almost as certain — for her enemies to revile. The essence of her accomplishment was external to her. She only gave it a medium; a voice. Ronald Reagan perhaps put it best when he said: “There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.â€
Thatcher ends her long life, the last of the three, at a moment when everyone is out of credit, or rather living on it. She passes in an uncertain hour, the story of her life and times a pointed reminder of how far we have fallen from those days.
Thatcher reversed the course of Britain’s economic stagnation and decline, ending the long post-war reign of Socialism over Britain. Unfortunately, like her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, she failed to leave behind a worthy successor, and Labour was able to regain power and resume its work of destroying Britain’s culture, economy, civilization, and traditions.
Newt Gingrich was criticized at Saturday’s debate by Ron Paul and Mitt Romney for making an unfashionable, non-politically-correct historical observation about the Palestinian claim to nationhood. Both of Gingrich’s rivals scolded the former Speaker for unnecessarily inflaming the situation by stating a truth our adversaries do not like to hear.
Gingrich responded by observing that Ronald Reagan has gone down in history for doing exactly the same thing.
Rafal Heydel-Makoo forwarded on Facebook this morning a very apt video of Margaret Thatcher, another great leader of the past, indulging in the kind of candor which is so frowned upon by conventional, mediocre politicians. “They’re a weak lot in Europe… Weak. Feeble.” says Thatcher with unconcealed contempt.
From Eric Ames, at Ricochet, who goes on to observe:
It is the fundamental problem with the leftist complaint about income inequality: if they truly are worried about income inequality, then they are not worried about the actual welfare of real people. They are just mad that some people have more than others. If they take this seriously, it means that fixing poverty is no less an acceptable policy goal as making everyone poor. After all, if the gap is what is important, it shouldn’t matter how much anyone has so long as nobody has more than anybody else.
This goes right back to George Will’s point on the difference between the right and the left; the right wants equality of opportunity, the left wants equality of outcome. The whole Occupy movement, in fact, smacks of an irritating “it’s not fairism.” It’s not fair that there are winners and losers, so let’s make everyone a loser.
