I used to have the picture above taped to my refrigerator door — it was clipped originally from Le Monde, which had really witty photo editors back in the day. It shows Maggie Thatcher dancing with Kenneth Kaunda. The version shown here is so over-contrasty that I don’t know whether you can see the lily-white hanky that the grocer’s daughter has draped over her hand before entrusting its Saxon pallor to the African strongman’s swarthy grasp.
I was reminded of the picture today when I read Barack Obama’s treacly, fulsome eulogy of the inimitable old bat. For sheer dog-faced shamelessness Obie, in his funereal mode, is hard to beat. Here’s the whole thing — really, trust me, you don’t want to miss a word:
With the passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher(*), the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend. As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered. As prime minister, she helped restore the confidence and pride that has always been the hallmark of Britain at its best. And as an unapologetic supporter of our transatlantic alliance, she knew that with strength and resolve we could win the Cold War and extend freedom’s promise.
Here in America, many of us will never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history—we can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will. Michelle and I send our thoughts to the Thatcher family and all the British people as we carry on the work to which she dedicated her life—free peoples standing together, determined to write our own destiny.
Not just freedom, not just liberty, but freedom AND liberty. A twofer. And an example to our daughters, God help us. I don’t think my own daughter particularly admired Maggie, but perhaps she wouldn’t have told me if she did.
And ‘passing’? Fuck, can’t anybody say ‘death’ any more?
All the things that my Obamaphile friends value about Obie come down, in the last analysis, to things he has said, since none of them are right-wing enough to like anything he’s actually done. (Apart from the two or three dedicated Zionists, who strongly approve of his sedulous fellation of Israel.)
But even on the plane of mere words, some of what he says seems to matter to my Obamaphile friends, and other stuff gets swept aside. This paean to one of the most horrible political figures of our time — a real Horsewoman Of The Apocalypse — clearly went into the liberal Memory Hole even before it was uttered.
Now anent Maggie herself, let the record show there was something rather likable about her on a purely personal level, leaving the politics out of it. She always did seem to be having a whale of a time, particularly in the House of Commons — whereas most liberals, and most especially Obama, always have a pinched pained expression, as if they needed a laxative. Badly. But Maggie, in her own carnivorous way, was a good-time girl. One can — well, this one can, anyway — watch old clips of her baiting and being baited at Question Time with real pleasure. And she and that giddy airhead Reagan always looked like teenagers on a joyride as soon as they got into a golf cart together.
I think they were both rather uncomplicated personalities, and neither of them had a shred of conscience. Of course one entailment of this happy state is that you can’t suffer from bad conscience, as liberals chronically do.
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(*) By the way, am I correct in believing that this phrase is a solecism? You could say Lady Margaret, with or without the Thatcher, or you could say Baroness Thatcher, or Lady Thatcher. But this overstuffed form just sounds ignorant and wrong to me. I will defer however to those better acquainted with the Sassenach toffery than I.
Baroness Thatcher would be the proper moniker. Obama could have said Margaret, Baroness Thatcher; but this might have proven confusing to some – the same ones who in English class assume that Tennyson’s middle name was Lord.
Very sporting of Obama to confess that he is carrying on “the work to which she dedicated her life.” Can’t argue with that. The College of Cardinal Liberals will no doubt expound on this, assuring us that his holiness was in no way departing from the tenets of the one true faith. Can’t dispute that, either.
That’s the real beauty of eulogies such as these: you apotheosize yourself in the most vainglorious manner while ostensibly lauding another. “Moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will”: yes, that is what she and I exemplify, do we not? But now that this Valkyrie has nobly fallen upon the pyre, I will proudly carry her spear as I stride to Valhalla.
I didn’t even know Baroness Margret Anne Cauliflower Thatcher had been still alive, frankly. On the other hand, if she’d turned out to be immortal I’d hardly’ve been surprised me.
Is Reagan still with us, by the way?
Didn’t the Senate declare him a god? Or perhaps I imagined that part, having slipped into a coma during the seemingly endless obsequies following his demise.
“Is Reagan still with us, by the way?”
He’s still with us in spirit, though they’ve updated the skin tone on his current doppelganger to make him more appealing to liberals.
Our daughters are finding out how shatterable the glass floor is as One Big Ass Mistake America carries on the work Mrs Thatchhead dedicated her life to.
Sociopaths always seem to be a jolly bunch. Nobody ever accuses them of crying their way to the bank, after all.
I got to meet the Iron Lady and her bulletproof bouffant in person one time when she was visiting where I worked in Manhattan. As she got out of her Rolls Royce we made eye contact and she shot me a look of pure, malevolent evil that had some primitive reptilian alarm system in my brain screaming “danger, Will Robinson!” I have met a few people in life who could scare me with a glance, and most of them were people you would be wise to be afraid of. But she was the first and only woman I have ever met that had that effect on me.
Heh. This rings true. Politicians can be very charming — like all the other kinds of sociopaths — when they make the effort. But catch ’em at all off guard and you’re apt to get the Look you describe so well. They don’t even have to be prime ministers. You can get it from a City Council drone.
“I think they were both rather uncomplicated personalities, and neither of them had a shred of conscience.”
I think they did, it’s just what their conscience told them was right and true would be unconscionable to folks of our political persuasion.
I used to masturbate a lot in my teens and because of the way I was raised I always had attacks of conscience afterwards, feeling guilty for what is a quite harmless and fun activity. Later on I figured out that the assumptions and beliefs that went into the construction of my conscience were, well… twisted by religious indoctrination.
Anyway, conscience is a malleable thing. Quite useless outside the scope of self examination and questioning of one’s assumptions and beliefs. And I think that’s where the Reagan and Thatcher type folks are missing. A result of their “uncomplicated personalities” as you put it.
Anyway, if there’s a hell they’re both in it burning and getting hot pokers rammed up their asses.
http://redmolucca.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/tramp-the-dirt-down/
George Galloway warmly remembers the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, or, as I recall her in an ineradicable false memory, the Duchess of Dullitch.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/08/britain-divided-margaret-thatcher-record-poll
Like Reagan earlier, the public at large reveals in its attitudes how effective the main stream media’s propaganda has been. People think that she was an important role model for women generally, showing what a woman is capable of…. when she abandons her humanity for the sake of her official position, as I perceive matters, anyhow. It seems an odd attitude for a nation that has paid obeisance to a female monarch for 60 years and which has a history of bizarre or forgettable kings and renowned queens. Perhaps the ‘grocer’s daughter’ aspect is important to the public. What would it take to actually wake up her ‘still getting by’ victims to what she did to them?
The phrase, the County of Lincolnshire, sounds redundant to me, but the Wiki article on Kesteven uses it to name one the district’s best known former non-resident.
One blunder per comment, at a minimum.