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"I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t”

Whitewing

Well-known member
When the country most needed it, they elected this:
Margaret-Thatcher.jpg


When the country least needed it, they elected this:
obama_bike.jpg


God help America.

UNLESS WE change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.” Margaret Thatcher, never given to understatement, presented that grim vision for Britain in 1979, the year she became prime minister.

Then, for the next 11½ years — almost as long as three U.S. presidential terms — she worked with fierce determination and unrelenting stubbornness to dispel it. By the time she left office, reluctantly, in 1990, there was not much talk anymore of Britain’s inexorable decline. Ms. Thatcher had changed not only her country’s direction but also its standing in the world. She continued to be passionately detested by some and admired and respected by others long after she left office, and her record will be debated for decades — or centuries. What is hardly debatable is the proposition that she was, in every sense of the word, a leader.

Margaret Thatcher was a new kind of Conservative in British politics, a true-believing, Friedrich von Hayek-quoting enemy of what she saw as the excesses of the welfare state, of the unions that seemed to run it and of the mass of socialist encrustations that had formed on the Labor Party’s left wing after World War II. She thought statism was crushing the nation’s economy, destroying the morale of its people and rapidly diminishing its standing in the world. Apparently a good many Britons agreed with her, though not necessarily with her fervent embrace of the total conservative ideology. The country was ready for a break with the postwar past, and Ms. Thatcher’s party had the good sense to see in her the forcefulness, conviction and eloquence that could bring it off.

Ms. Thatcher’s great domestic battles as prime minister were waged against the institutional left and its supporters among the British intelligentsia, which meant, of course, that they were extremely entertaining. They were fought on the same issue that divides Europeans to this day: When does the people’s demand for security become so all-consuming that it overtaxes the economy, saps initiative and buries the state under a mountain of debt? She worked for deregulation, privatization of state enterprises, tax changes and other domestic reforms she felt were desperately needed, many of which worked real hardship on the country’s poor, at least in the short term.

But outside Britain she will be remembered primarily as a world figure. She strengthened Britain’s ties with the United States, bolstered its military, supported the placement of intermediate-range missiles in Europe (an extremely controversial move at the time) and spoke out with undiplomatic boldness when she took offense at some countries’ actions. She saw a great divide between freedom and the various forms of tyranny in the world, and she made it clear, always, which side she was on. She voiced harsh criticism of the the Soviet Union but also, like her good friend Ronald Reagan, moved to engage its new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.


She made her name in the world a few years into her first term, when the military government in Argentina sought to whip up popular support by invading the nearby Falkland Islands. It was a largely unpopulated place, but those who did inhabit it had no desire to live under the Argentine regime of the time, and Ms. Thatcher had no intention of letting the invasion stand. Against the advice of many, she ordered a military invasion of the Falklands and retook the islands. Eight years later, after another act of aggression in another part of the world, she reinforced President George H.W. Bush’s resolve to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait.

Ms. Thatcher, who was raised in the family apartment over her father’s grocery store in Lincolnshire, and who thought that everyday upbringing was an ideal preparation for political life, officially became a lady (a baroness) after she left office. She was pushed out by divisions within her party on several issues, the most important being the rapid pace of European integration, of which she was skeptical. For some years afterward, she continued to write, speak and agitate. The first woman to serve as Britain’s prime minister, she held the post longer than anyone else in the 20th century, and she might have held it even longer, had she been a bit more flexible. But then of course she wouldn’t have been Maggie Thatcher.

“I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t,” she said in an interview shortly before her election as prime minister 32 years ago. She did what she thought necessary to stop that decline, and she didn’t really seem to have much worry about what anyone else thought of it. Her toughness in negotiation exasperated and even enraged adversaries. “I’m extraordinarily patient,” she once told an interviewer, “provided I get my own way in the end.”
 

TexasBred

Well-known member
A narciissistic sob like Obama would never admit that he is the least bit wrong about anything, let alone attempt to follow the lead of someone who actually knew where they were going.
 

Whitewing

Well-known member
TexasBred said:
A narciissistic sob like Obama would never admit that he is the least bit wrong about anything, let alone attempt to follow the lead of someone who actually knew where they were going.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it all. History will mark his election as the turning point.

And why would you say narcissistic? Doesn't every prez give recordings of their speeches to the dignitaries of other countries? :roll:
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Well, at least he is for gay marriage and abortion...social issues like these will turn the Country aroiund.

WW? Isn't that why our gay bussinessman friend from Chicago voted for him. :lol: :lol:
 

Whitewing

Well-known member
hypocritexposer said:
Well, at least he is for gay marriage and abortion...social issues like these will turn the Country aroiund.

WW? Isn't that why our gay bussinessman friend from Chicago voted for him. :lol: :lol:

I don't think he's from Chicago, but yes, that's why he voted for him...for those burning bedroom issues that will define his kid's future. BTW, I hope his kid comes home one day and introduces him and mom to his new life partner, Max.
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Whitewing said:
hypocritexposer said:
Well, at least he is for gay marriage and abortion...social issues like these will turn the Country aroiund.

WW? Isn't that why our gay bussinessman friend from Chicago voted for him. :lol: :lol:

I don't think he's from Chicago, but yes, that's why he voted for him...for those burning bedroom issues that will define his kid's future. BTW, I hope his kid comes home one day and introduces him and mom to his new life partner, Max.

Just outside Chicago. Driving distance to the same bath houses Barry hung out at, that's for sure. :lol:

Have you never visited with him, in your travels?

I don't think him and I, in the same room, would be a good idea. :lol:
 

Martin Jr.

Well-known member
Tags: Margaret Thatcher 1925-2013 | thatcher | stroke | funeral | death Michael Reagan to Newsmax: Dad Needed Thatcher to End Cold War
Monday, 08 Apr 2013 04:08 PM

By Lisa Barron

More ways to share... Mixx Stumbled LinkedIn Vine Buzzflash Reddit Delicious Newstrust Technocrati Share: More . . . A A | Email Us | Print | Forward Article
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inShare inShare1 Ronald Reagan needed Margaret Thatcher to fulfill his world-wide accomplishments and without her the Cold War may never have ended, his son Michael tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview.

Thatcher, the last of the triumvirate of Communist-bloc defeating world leaders — which also included Pope John Paul II — died on Monday of a stroke. She was 87.

“Without them, the Berlin Wall would still be up, Poland would still be being held, and freedom wouldn’t be reigning in that area of the world, if those three had not existed,” said the younger Reagan.

“One couldn’t have done it without the other. And that’s the important thing.”

He said no-one should forget the placard that was on Ronald Reagan’s desk that read “No telling what man can accomplish if he doesn’t worry about who gets the credit.” That spirit embodied the Reagan-Thatcher axis.

“We have too many people today trying to take all of the credit and nothing gets done; neither one of them worried about who got the credit, they just got it done.

“That was what’s so special about either one of them. Their legacies are tied together in the fall of Communism and freedom breaking out in that part of the world — as is Pope John Paul.

“Now the three of them are gone, but the three of them are probably all still together.”

Michael Reagan noted that 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of the invasion of Grenada, a former British colony that remains part of the Commonwealth. He said his father was playing his plans “close to his chest” and had told virtually no-one.

“One of the staff members came in and said ‘Mr. President, (Mrs.) Thatcher’s on the phone,’ and my father remembered, ‘oh my gosh, we’re flying through her air space and I forgot to even tell her,’” says Reagan, adding, “So he gets on the phone with Lady Thatcher — and hopefully sent her a dozen roses — and says he can make up for it and is very sorry he didn’t tell her.”

Reagan says he remembers Thatcher on the day after his father’s funeral in 2004. She was already ill and there head been doubts that she would make the trip from London to California.

The “Iron Lady” came over to Michael and said it would have been wonderful if his father had won the 1976 election, in which Gerald Ford defeated him in the Republican primaries.

“I said to her, ‘Lady Thatcher, we would still be fighting the Cold War had he been elected in 1976,’ and she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Where were you? Where was Pope John Paul?’

“She just looked at me and I said, ‘Had you not been there when my father was elected in 1980, had Pope John Paul not been there when he was elected in 1980, he may not have accomplished anything.

“‘It took all of you working together, and you needed that leader in the western hemisphere who was going to stand up and stand strong with you and you would stand strong with him.’

“She said, ‘I never thought of that.’"

Reagan said his father “always had a deep respect and deep feeling for" Thatcher. He says that he will attend Thatcher’s funeral if asked.


© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
 

Whitewing

Well-known member
“No telling what man can accomplish if he doesn’t worry about who gets the credit.”

Juxtaposed to our Ego-in-chief who used "my" 21 times, "me" 12 times, and "I" 30 times, in a 1600 word speech for the funeral for Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye.

Pompous asshole.
 
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