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Party at Trafalgar Square this sunday at 6!
Now get busy googling your feeble retorts.
You can forgive Sloggers, to them Pol Pot is an ideal, a socialist to be honored.
And while she was a pioneer in female leaders, she was not the first - just one of the worst.
Whinge away losers, we all get to enjoy her legacy of freedom and prosperity.
Indeed. She served Great Britain for better or for worse depending on your point of view.
Magaret Thatcher RIP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfcM1c6Lg…
In that respect, she was in a very select group. I'd add Indira Gandhi, Hillary Clinton, Benazir Bhutto and Corazon Aquino to the list, but they all relied to some extent on male family connections to get their careers started. Thatcher was entirely sui generis.
Thanks for the laff lads!
Maggie's legacy lives on in our freedom and prosperity and the death of socialism except in a few backward leftist paradises like Zimbabwe, North Korea and Cuba.
"Margaret Thatcher Dies; Remade Britain"
Thanks Maggie!
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/0…
Golda Meir should be on that list too.
She was the "Iron Lady" of Israel years before Thatcher, and Meir also made it to the top on her own.
Are you telling me that Andrew Sullivan is a conservative fuckwit? 'Cause you should be telling Savage that, 'cause it's not news to me.
Her attraction to dictators was well-known. She just ADORED little old P.W. Botha's shiny bald head. She loved Zia of Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pinochet in Chile and the Khmer Rouge. She turned out to be on the wrong side of most of the geopolitical issues of the day; even the Tories today, while they will avoid criticizing her directly, are always talking about "the mistakes my party made in the past". There are a lot of them.
As with most things economical the answer with Thatcher is somewhere in the middle. The reason there's so much vitriol surrounding her is that she herself brought it on. She never held back from attacking her opponents real or imagined, and chief among those opponents where anyone even remotely connected to the working class. It wasn't her policies that created the rageful reaction, it was the glee that accompanied them.
She is routinely accused of doing all sorts of things that would have happened anyways, like the collapse of British manufacturing -- British manufacturing died because "the British Disease" is not, as commonly formulated, out-of-control workers but rather grotesquely incompetent management. British car workers, for example, were and are some of the best in the world -- but the British car industry was run by people who destroyed their own industry more effectively than a half million dedicated Soviet Communists could ever have dreamed of.
Similarly, coal was going to go away whether Thatcher got elected or not. These are international and generational changes that politicians ultimately have little direct effect upon.
The thing is, though, if you're going to take credit for things, you're going to get it -- even if it's negative. She didn't destroy the coal industry, but she presided over its death -- and she was GLEEFUL about it, making it endlessly apparent on TV that destroying the coal industry and ruining the lives of the miners and the communities in which they lived gave her ecstatic pleasure. That's what gets people riled up, even today.
Her handling of Northern Ireland was cack-handed at best, not from a conservative or liberal position, or a Catholic or Protestant one, but from any rational point of view: she made the problem worse, not better, and DELIBERATELY worse, because she saw every single issue as a question of "for us" or "against us", with nothing in the middle -- if you were in the middle, or just trying to keep your head down, you were the enemy, and got the full blast.
In short, any excesses of feeling her death has occasioned were brought upon by herself. That's how she operated; that's how she liked it.
Hers is one of the two graves I intend to pour liquid gold on at some future date.
You can put your Pilger factoids away now….
So, for all you armchair, coffee shop socialists, who've never had to suffer under a state-run economy, which of these industries that were privatized would you re-nationalize?
A
▪ Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act 1977
▪ Anglian Water
▪ Austin Rover Group
B
▪ Heathrow Airport Holdings
▪ BNFL
▪ British Aerospace
▪ British Airways
▪ British Coal
▪ British Electricity Authority
▪ British Energy
▪ British European Airways
▪ British Leyland
▪ British Overseas Airways Corporation
▪ British Rail
▪ British Road Services
▪ British Shipbuilders
▪ British South American Airways
▪ British Steel
▪ British Telecom
▪ British Transport Docks Board
▪ British Waterways
C
▪ Central Electricity Authority
▪ Central Electricity Generating Board
▪ Consett Iron Company
D
▪ David Colville & Sons
▪ Dee Valley Water
E
▪ East Midlands Electricity
▪ East Yorkshire Motor Services
▪ Eastern Counties Omnibus Company
▪ Eastern Electricity Board
▪ Electricity Act 1947
E cont.
▪ Electricity Council
▪ English Steel Corporation
I
▪ Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain
J
▪ John Summers & Sons
L
▪ Lancashire Steel Corporation
M
▪ MANWEB
▪ Metropolitan Water Board (London)
▪ Midland Red
▪ Midlands Electricity
N
▪ National Bus Company (UK)
▪ National Coal Board
▪ National Express Coaches
▪ National Freight Corporation
▪ National Grid plc
▪ National Power
▪ National Shipbuilders Securities
▪ New Electricity Trading Arrangements
▪ North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board
▪ North Thames Gas Board
▪ North West Water
▪ Northern Electric
▪ Northumbrian Water Group
▪ NORWEB
O
▪ Oxford Bus Company
P
▪ Pickfords
▪ Post Office Telecommunications
▪ Public electricity suppliers
R
▪ Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854
▪ Red Star Parcels
▪ Richard Thomas and Baldwins
▪ Rover Group
S
▪ Scottish Bus Group
▪ Scottish Gas Board
▪ Scottish Nuclear
▪ Scottish Power
▪ Scottish Transport Group
▪ SEEBOARD
▪ Severn Trent
▪ South of Scotland Electricity Board
▪ South Wales Electricity
▪ South Western Electricity
▪ Southern Electric
▪ Southern Water
▪ State Management Scheme
▪ Steel Company of Wales
T
▪ Thames Water
▪ Thomas Cook
▪ Transport Act 1947
▪ Transport Act 1962
▪ Transport Act 1968
▪ Transport Holding Company
U
▪ Ulster Transport Authority
▪ Unipart
V
▪ Victoria Coach Station
W
▪ Water Act 1973
▪ Welsh Water
▪ Wessex Water
Y
▪ Yorkshire Electricity
▪ Yorkshire Traction
▪ Yorkshire Water
You're not even really British.
Btw how many years after Pol Pot was disposed did Chomsky and the left admit they were wrong on the Khmer Rouge, their ideological brethren?
Pinochet killed 3500 people in nearly 20 years. Do you know what the communists would have called that if they'd run Chile for 20 years? A slow weekend.
If not for Pinochet, Chile wouldn't be the free market success story it is today.
Fuckwit.
Unless you bring Lenin back from the dead I don't think left of the odious America hating Sanders is possible.
@30 and 52
You mean the disgusting thug and traitor FDR, right? No? Wow, you DO realize that while pot is legal, acid still isn't don't you kiddos?
@Thatcher
One of the few decent leaders in post WW2 Europe. The rest are a lot of ill educated morons and bandits using the power of the state to mug productive citizens at the behest of the losers who voted for them. (See Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc etc etc. Germany only escapes from a rigid work ethic that transcends lunatic economic theories.) RIP, and strum a harp in heaven for those who hated your greatness, Maggie Thatcher. You and Reagan should have some great times together where most of those posting haven't a snowballs chance in your ultimate destination of getting.
The good: She was Britain's only female PM. I wish it had been somebody else, but I'm grateful that there has been at least one who broke the glass ceiling. She defended the Falklands.
The bad: She screwed the working class of Britain, stole Scotland's oil, brutally oppressed the Irish, imposed draconian anti-GLBT legislation, severely repressed freedom of speech. She was no democrat, she was anti-democratic to her core.
The ugly: Mass riots that broke out across the UK during her rule, violence amplified in Northern Ireland, garbage strikes that left the place a stinking ruin. She shored up support for Reagan here in America, at a time when Reagan's own policies left this country a shambles. She left her country and the world a shambles when the voters finally gave her the boot. Had she any moral conscience at all, her Alzheimer's would have been the only thing keeping her guilt from destroying her.
She's gone. In Britain her legacy is disputed, but here her ghost is remembered fondly.
In the end, it does not matter what this hack blog commenter thinks of Thatcher. Few will read this, and even fewer will care. For what little this is worth, I am glad to see her gone