Rest in Peace

[Crafty_Dog]

Another one:


Not for Turning
The woman who saved Britain with a message of freedom. .
 
In that dreary winter of 1979, the piles of uncollected trash in London's Finsbury Park seemed to stretch for miles. The garbagemen were on strike. So too, at one time or another, were hospital workers, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, railwaymen. Also gravediggers: In Liverpool, corpses had to be warehoused as they awaited burial—yet another long queue that socialist Britain had arranged for its patient masses.

This was the "Winter of Discontent," when Great Britain came about as close to economic collapse as at nearly any point in its peacetime history, and it was the country Margaret Thatcher inherited when, on May 3, she defeated the Labour government of James Callaghan to become Prime Minister—the first woman in the office and 49th in a line that includes some of the greatest figures of Western civilization: Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, the Duke of Wellington, William Pitt the Younger.

***
Thatcher died in London Monday, at age 87, having earned her place among the greats. This is not simply because she revived Britain's economy, though that was no mean achievement. Nor is it because she held office longer than any of her predecessors, though this also testifies to her political skill. She achieved greatness because she articulated a set of vital ideas about economic freedom, national self-respect and personal virtue, sold them to a skeptical public and then demonstrated their efficacy.

Consider economic policy. Britain in 1979 had a double-digit inflation rate, a top income tax rate of 83% and rising unemployment. Public expenditures accounted for 42.5% of GDP. There were price, dividend, currency and wage controls, although the last of these were flouted by trade unions on whose support the Labour government depended.

The government accounted for about 30% of the work force. The state controlled most major industries: British Aerospace, BA.LN +0.54%British Airways, IAG.MC -1.05%British Telecom, BT.A.LN -0.04%British Steel, British Leyland, the British National Oil Corporation, Associated British Ports, Cable and Wireless, Rolls Royce. What was left of a private economy was smothered in red tape.

Most British policy makers of the time had no real grasp of economics: no idea what caused inflation; no idea how to run state-owned enterprises (much less that government shouldn't run businesses at all); no idea—beyond increasing civil-service rolls—how to create jobs. Worse, the cluelessness was bipartisan. "The Tories loosened the corset of socialism," Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. "They never removed it."

Thatcher was different, an "instinctive conservative" whose economic philosophy drew from her father's observations of stocking a grocery. Her memoir recalls her youthful wonder at "The great complex romance of international trade which recruited people from all over the world to ensure that a family in Grantham could have on its table rice from India, coffee from Kenya, sugar from the West Indies." She had also, with her cabinet colleague Keith Joseph, spent years transforming those instincts into practical theories for governance.

And so it went for the next 11 years, as Thatcher and her government stopped printing excess money to kill inflation, cut marginal tax rates to unleash private incentives, privatized public housing so the poor could own their own homes, did away with currency, price and wage controls to eliminate the distortions they imposed on the economy, curbed runaway spending and sold off one state asset after another so they might be competently and profitably managed.

All this was done despite sharp short-term economic shocks and in the teeth of immense resistance, particularly from trade unions. In 1984, the coal miners union of Arthur Scargill went on strike for nearly a year. Similar strikes had brought past governments to their knees, but Thatcher, in a feat of immense courage and political skill, remained immovable and eventually won public opinion to her side. As she had famously said of herself a few years earlier (without being believed), "the lady is not for turning."

But staring down labor unions was the least of it. In March 1979, a faction of the Irish Republican Army murdered Airey Neave, her campaign manager. Eleven years later, they murdered Ian Gow, her former private secretary. There would be IRA outrages at the Harrods department store, in London's Hyde and Regent's Parks, in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, and, in October 1984, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Thatcher was herself the principal target. None of this cowed Thatcher, who understood that the main threat IRA terrorism posed wasn't so much to British sovereignty in Northern Ireland as it was to the very concept of majority rule.

The same went for the Falklands. Critics of that war paint it as a display of jingoism, carried out chiefly for Thatcher's political convenience. Yet the issues at stake were larger than the possession of some rocky and frigid islands in the South Atlantic. Would Argentina's unprovoked aggression be resisted or rewarded? Would 1,800 Falklanders—loyal to the Crown, English-speaking—be consigned without real protest to foreign rule and dictatorship?

There should never have been any serious argument over these questions, but there was. And looking back, it's remarkable how much Thatcher was willing to risk in a fight lesser statesmen would as soon have skipped. Britain lost six ships and suffered hundreds of casualties in the war. But in fighting Thatcher showed that Britain was prepared to defend its rights, its interests and its principles—intangible assets of nationhood that had once made the country great.

These assets served more than Britain. Thatcher understood that Britain's fight was also the West's, and vice versa. So she agreed, over massive protests, to the stationing of U.S. nuclear cruise missiles at Greenham Common as a counterforce to the Soviet SS-20; and she agreed to let the U.S. launch air strikes from British bases against Libya, in retaliation for Moammar Gadhafi's terrorist campaigns in Europe. In summer 1990 she steeled President George H.W. Bush after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait: "This is no time to go wobbly."

Deeper than this was Thatcher's sympathy with what is best in America: freedom, enterprise, opportunity, optimism and the urge for self-improvement. No doubt this reflected Thatcher's background as a grocer's daughter who'd risen on her own talent and effort.

It did not, however, always reflect British or even Tory opinion, which was (and remains) prone to seeing the U.S. as a coarse, overbearing ally. Preserving the "special relationship" is more than the default option of British leadership: It is a political choice that has to be defended against alternatives such as "Europe." Thatcher, like Churchill before her and Tony Blair afterward, always made the choice to remain close to America, one reason the three are often admired more in the U.S. than at home.

Over Thatcher's long tenure there were bound to be misjudgments. Whatever the policy merits of her "poll tax," its implementation was badly handled and ultimately led to her political downfall. A larger blot were the terms of the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule with no guarantee of democratic self-rule. We remember her vigorous defense of that decision when she visited our offices in the mid-1980s, which she punctuated by asking: "Do I make myself clear?" She had, but the colony's six million British subjects deserved better from such a champion of freedom.

***
Still, the failures dim next to the overall legacy. Thatcher came to power when Britain and the West were in every kind of crisis: social, economic, moral and strategic. Along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, she showed the world the way out. She believed in the inherent right of free men to craft their own destinies, and in the capacity of free nations to resist and overcome every kind of tyranny and injustice.

These were the right beliefs then as now. She was the right woman at the right time.

[Crafty_Dog]

By PAUL JOHNSON (Marc: PJ is one of the great historians e.g. "Modern Times)

Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around—decisively—the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. "Thatcherism" was the most popular and successful way of running a country in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st.

Her origins were humble. Born Oct. 13, 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Alfred Roberts was no ordinary shopkeeper. He was prominent in local government and a man of decided economic and political views. Thatcher later claimed her views had been shaped by gurus like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, but these were clearly the icing on a cake baked in her childhood by Councillor Roberts. This was a blend of Adam Smith and the Ten Commandments, the three most important elements being hard work, telling the truth, and paying bills on time.

Hard work took Miss Roberts, via a series of scholarships, to Grantham Girls' School, Somerville College, Oxford, and two degrees, in chemistry and law. She practiced in both professions, first as a research chemist, then as a barrister from 1954. By temperament she was always a scholarship girl, always avid to learn, and even when prime minister still carried in her capacious handbag a notebook in which she wrote down anything you told her that she thought memorable.

At the same time, she was intensely feminine, loved buying and wearing smart clothes, had the best head of hair in British politics and spent a fortune keeping it well dressed. At Oxford, punting on the Isis and Cherwell rivers, she could be frivolous and flirtatious, and all her life she tended to prefer handsome men to plain ones. Her husband, Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951 and by whom she had a son and daughter, was not exactly dashing but he was rich (oil industry), a capable businessman, a rock on which she could always lean in bad times, and a source of funny 19th-hole sayings.

Denis was amenable (or resigned) to her pursuing a political career, and in 1959 she was elected MP for Finchley, a London suburb. She was exceptionally lucky to secure this rock-solid Tory seat, so conveniently placed near Westminster and her home. She held the seat without trouble until her retirement 33 years later. Indeed, Thatcher was always accounted a lucky politician. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan soon (in 1961) gave her a junior office at Pensions, and when the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, she was fortunate to be allotted to the one seat in the cabinet reserved for a woman, secretary of state for education.

There she kept her nose clean and was lucky not to be involved in the financial and economic wreckage of the disastrous Ted Heath government. The 1970s marked the climax of Britain's postwar decline, in which "the English disease"—overweening trade-union power—was undermining the economy by strikes and inflationary wage settlements. The Boilermakers Union had already smashed the shipbuilding industry. The Amalgamated Engineers Union was crushing what was left of the car industry. The print unions were imposing growing censorship on the press. Not least, the miners union, under the Stalinist Arthur Scargill, had invented new picketing strategies that enabled them to paralyze the country wherever they chose.

Attempts at reform had led to the overthrow of the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1970, and an anti-union bill put through by Heath led to the destruction of his majority in 1974 and its replacement by another weak Wilson government that tipped the balance of power still further in the direction of the unions. The general view was that Britain was "ungovernable."

Among Tory backbenchers there was a growing feeling that Heath must go. Thatcher was one of his critics, and she encouraged the leader of her wing of the party, Keith Joseph, to stand against him. However, at the last moment Joseph's nerve failed him and he refused to run. It was in these circumstances that Thatcher, who had never seen herself as a leader, let alone prime minister, put herself forward. As a matter of courtesy, she went to Heath's office to tell him that she was putting up for his job. He did not even look up from his desk, where he was writing, merely saying: "You'll lose, you know"—a characteristic combination of bad manners and bad judgment. In fact she won handsomely, thereby beginning one of the great romantic adventures of modern British politics.

The date was 1975, and four more terrible years were to pass before Thatcher had the opportunity to achieve power and come to Britain's rescue. In the end, it was the unions themselves who put her into office by smashing up the James Callaghan Labour government in the winter of 1978-79—the so-called Winter of Discontent—enabling the Tories to win the election the following May with a comfortable majority.

Thatcher's long ministry of nearly a dozen years is often mistakenly described as ideological in tone. In fact Thatcherism was (and is) essentially pragmatic and empirical. She tackled the unions not by producing, like Heath, a single comprehensive statute but by a series of measures, each dealing with a particular abuse, such as aggressive picketing. At the same time she, and the police, prepared for trouble by a number of ingenious administrative changes allowing the country's different police forces to concentrate large and mobile columns wherever needed. Then she calmly waited, relying on the stupidity of the union leaders to fall into the trap, which they duly did.

She fought and won two pitched battles with the two strongest unions, the miners and the printers. In both cases, victory came at the cost of weeks of fighting and some loss of life. After the hard men had been vanquished, the other unions surrendered, and the new legislation was meekly accepted, no attempt being made to repeal or change it when Labour eventually returned to power. Britain was transformed from the most strike-ridden country in Europe to a place where industrial action is a rarity. The effect on the freedom of managers to run their businesses and introduce innovations was almost miraculous and has continued.

Thatcher reinforced this essential improvement by a revolutionary simplification of the tax system, reducing a score or more "bands" to two and lowering the top rates from 83% (earned income) and 98% (unearned) to the single band of 40%.

She also reduced Britain's huge and loss-making state-owned industries, nearly a third of the economy, to less than one-tenth, by her new policy of privatization—inviting the public to buy from the state industries, such as coal, steel, utilities and transport by bargain share offers. Hence loss-makers, funded from taxes, became themselves profit-making and so massive tax contributors.

This transformation was soon imitated all over the world. More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.

As a result Britain was soon absorbing more than 50% of all inward investment in Europe, the British economy rose from the sixth to the fourth largest in the world, and its production per capita, having been half that of Germany's in the 1970s, became, by the early years of the 21st century, one-third higher.

The kind of services that Thatcher rendered Britain in peace were of a magnitude equal to Winston Churchill's in war. She also gave indications that she might make a notable wartime leader, too. When she first took over, her knowledge of foreign affairs was negligible. Equally, foreigners did not at first appreciate that a new and stronger hand was now in control in London. There were exceptions. Ronald Reagan, right from the start, liked what he heard of her. He indicated that he regarded her as a fellow spirit, even while still running for president, with rhetoric that was consonant with her activities.

Once Reagan was installed in the White House, the pair immediately reinvigorated the "special relationship." It was just as well. Some foreigners did not appreciate the force of what the Kremlin was beginning to call the Iron Lady. In 1982, the military dictatorship in Argentina, misled by the British Foreign Offices's apathetic responses to threats, took the hazardous step of invading and occupying the British Falkland Islands. This unprovoked act of aggression caught Thatcher unprepared, and for 36 hours she was nonplused and uncertain: The military and logistical objections to launching a combined-forces counterattack from 8,000 miles away were formidable.

But reassured by her service chiefs that, given resolution, the thing could be done, she made up her mind: It would be done, and thereafter her will to victory and her disregard of losses and risks never wavered. She was also assured by her friend Reagan that, short of sending forces, America would do all in its considerable power to help—a promise kept. Thus began one of the most notable campaigns in modern military and moral history, brought to a splendid conclusion by the unconditional surrender of all the Argentine forces on the islands, followed shortly by the collapse of the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires.

This spectacular success, combined with Thatcher's revival of the U.K. economy, enabled her to win a resounding electoral victory in 1983, followed by a third term in 1987. Thatcher never had any real difficulty in persuading the British electorate to back her, and it is likely that, given the chance, she would have won her fourth election in a row.

But it was a different matter with the Conservative Party, not for nothing once categorized by one of its leaders as the "stupid party." Some prominent Tories were never reconciled to her leadership. They included in particular the supporters of European federation, to which she was implacably opposed, their numbers swollen by grandees who had held high office under her but whom she had dumped without ceremony as ministerial failures. It was, too, a melancholy fact that she had become more imperious during her years of triumph and that power had corrupted her judgment.

This was made clear when she embarked on a fundamental reform of local-government finance. The reform itself was sensible, even noble, but its presentation was lamentable and its numerous opponents won the propaganda battle hands down. In the midst of this disaster, her Europhile opponents within her party devised a plot in 1990 to overthrow her by putting up one of their number (sacked from the cabinet for inefficiency) in the annual leadership election. Thatcher failed to win outright and was persuaded by friends to stand down. Thus ended one of the most remarkable careers in British political history.

Thatcher's strongest characteristic was her courage, both physical and moral. She displayed this again and again, notably when the IRA tried to murder her during the Tory Party Conference in 1984, and nearly succeeded, blowing up her hotel in the middle of the night. She insisted on opening the next morning's session right on time and in grand style. Immediately after courage came industry. She must have been the hardest-working prime minister in history, often working a 16-hour day and sitting up all night to write a speech. Her much-tried husband once complained, "You're not writing the Bible, you know."

She was not a feminist, despising the genre as "fashionable rot," though she once made a feminist remark. At a dreary public dinner of 500 male economists, having had to listen to nine speeches before being called herself, she began, with understandable irritation: "As the 10th speaker, and the only woman, I wish to say this: the cock may crow but it's the hen who lays the eggs."

Her political success once again demonstrates the importance of holding two or three simple ideas with fervor and tenacity, a virtue she shared with Ronald Reagan. One of these ideas was that the "evil empire" of communism could be and would be destroyed, and together with Reagan and Pope John Paul II she must be given the credit for doing it.

Among the British public she aroused fervent admiration and intense dislike in almost equal proportions, but in the world beyond she was recognized for what she was: a great, creative stateswoman who left the world a better and more prosperous place, and whose influence will reverberate well into the 21st century.

Mr. Johnson is a historian.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/455054/20130409/thatcher-death-party.htm

[G M]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/455054/20130409/thatcher-death-party.htm

I miss Great Britain. I hope these savages enjoy what they have coming.

[Crafty_Dog]

Moving Doug's post to here:

Hooray for Margaret Thatcher

by Milton Friedman, Newsweek, 9 July 1979

We have become so accustomed to politicians making extravagant campaign promises and then forgetting about them once elected that the first major act of Margaret Thatcher’s government— the budget unveiled on June 12—was a surprise. It did precisely what she had promised to do.

Margaret Thatcher campaigned on a platform of reversing the trend toward an ever more intrusive government—a trend that had carried government spending in Great Britain to somewhere between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the nation’s income. Ever since the end of World War II, both Labor and Tory governments have added to government-provided social services as well as to government-owned and -operated industry. Foreign-exchange transactions have been rigidly controlled. Taxes have been punitive, yet have not yielded enough to meet costs. Excessive money created to finance deficits sparked an inflation that hit a rate of over 30 per cent a year in mid-1975. Only recently was inflation brought down to the neighborhood of 10 per cent, and it is once again on the rise.
http://media.hoover.org/images/8488016185_991f5d9077.jpg?size=large
Most important of all, the persistent move to a centralized and collectivist economy produced economic stagnation. Before World War II, the British citizen enjoyed a real income that averaged close to twice that of the Frenchman or German. Today, the ratio is nearly reversed. The Frenchman or German enjoys a real income close to twice that of the ordinary Briton.

Margaret Thatcher declared in no uncertain terms that the long British experiment was a failure. She urged greater reliance on private enterprise and on market incentives. She promised to reduce the fraction of the people’s income that government spends on their behalf, and to cut sharply government control over the lives of British citizens. Her government’s budget is a major first step. It reduces the top marginal tax rate on so-called “earned” income from 83 per cent to 60 per cent, on “unearned” income from a confiscatory 98 per cent to 75 per cent. At the same time, it raises the level of income exempt from income tax and cuts the bottom rate from 33 per cent to 30 per cent. It proposes to cut government spending significantly, to sell some of the government’s industrial holdings and to promote the sale of government-owned housing units to their occupants. It loosens foreign-exchange controls substantially as a first step toward their elimination.
...
 I salute Margaret Thatcher and her government for their courage and wisdom in moving firmly and promptly to cut Britain’s bureaucratic straitjacket. Britain has enormous latent strength—in human capacities, industrial traditions, financial institutions, social stability. If these can be released from bondage, if incentive can be restored, Britain could once again become a vibrant, dynamic, increasingly productive economy.

In the United States, when the President proposes a budget, that is only the beginning. Congress disposes, and it may take many months before the final result is determined. In Britain, the situation is different. What the Prime Minister and Cabinet propose in effect becomes law as of that day—subject only to a vote of no-confidence in the government and a new national election. However, when the party in power has a majority in the House of Commons as large as the Tories now have, that is a purely hypothetical possibility.

What happens in Britain is of great importance to us. Ever since the founding of the colonies in the New World, Britain has been a major source of our economic and political thought. In the past few decades, we have been moving in the same direction as Britain and many other countries, though at a slower pace. If Britain’s change of direction succeeds, it will surely reinforce the pressures in the United States to cut our own government down to size.  (written 18 months before Reagan's first inauguration)

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/144256

[Crafty_Dog]

Noonan: Britain Remembers a Great Briton Mrs. Thatcher is with Wellington and Nelson now.
By PEGGY NOONAN
London

The funeral of Margaret Thatcher was beautiful, moving, just right. It had dignity and spirit, and in that respect was just like her. It also contained a surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise. It was a metaphor for where she stood in the pantheon of successful leaders of the 20th century.

The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, LG, OM, FRS—so she was called on the front page of the service program—was a great lady, and the greatest peacetime prime minister of England in the 20th century. She unleashed her nation's economy, defeated selfish bullies who before her had always emerged victorious, and stood with the pope and the president against Soviet communism. The main project of her career was to advance the cause of human freedom and individual liberty. As David Cameron's education minister, Michael Gove, noted the other day, she saw economics not as a science but as one of the humanities. It wasn't about "immutable laws," it was about "the instincts and values" of human beings, their sense of justice and rightness. She was eloquent, stirring and had tons of guts. And of course she was a woman, the first British prime minister to be so. She made no special pleading in that area and did not claim to represent what we embarrassingly call women's issues. She was representing England and the issues British citizens faced. She did not ignore her sex and occasionally bopped political men on the head with small, bracing recognitions of their frailty. "The cocks will crow, but it's the hen that lays the eggs," she said. She noted that if you want anything said get a man but, if you want something done get a woman. All this she uttered in a proud but mock-stern tone. She was no victim. An oddity of her career is that she was routinely patronized by her inferiors. It seems to have steeled her.

A supporter told me in London of her frustrations with staff. She said once to her aides: "I don't need to be told what, I need to be told how." Meaning I have a vision, you have to tell me how we can implement it. That stayed in my mind. Politics now, in England as well as America, is dominated by politicians who are technicians. They always know how to do it. They just don't know what to do.

Thatcher's funeral was striking in that it was not, actually, about her. It was about what she thought it important for the mourners to know. The readings were about the fact of God, the gift of Christ, and the necessity of loving your country and working for its betterment. There were no long eulogies. In a friendly and relatively brief address, the bishop of London lauded her kindness and character. No funeral of an American leader would ever be like that: The dead American would be the star, with God in the position of yet another mourner who'd miss his leadership.

The pageantry, for an American, was most moving. The English as always do this brilliantly but I wonder if they understand—they must, but it's not something they acknowledge—that when they bring out and put forward their splendor they are telling the world and themselves who they are and have been. Leading the procession into St. Paul's was the lord mayor of London, in velvet coat, breeches and buckled shoes. On his coat he wore Sir Thomas More's gold chain of office, taken from him before he was killed in the Tower. Imagine a nation that puts such a man to death, contemplates it, concludes in the end it was wrong, and now proudly displays the saint's chain at its greatest events. When I saw it I thought of a recent trip to the Vatican. Touring its archives, we were shown one of its proudest possessions: a letter from Galileo.

Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they're great.

It mattered that the funeral was in august and splendid St. Paul's, mattered that Thatcher's coffin, placed under the great dome, stood directly over the tombs of Nelson and Wellington in the crypts below. (Marcus Binney in the Times said conservatives will note the above; happy to oblige.) This placing of Thatcher with the greats of the past, and the fact that the queen and Prince Philip came to her funeral, as they have for no prime minister since Churchill in 1965, served as an antidote to British television coverage surrounding her death.

It was terrible. They could not in any sustained way mark her achievements or even show any particular respect. All they could say was that she was "divisive and controversial," although sometimes they said "divisive and—well, really divisive." Anchors reported everything as if from a great distance, with no warmth; they all adopted the cool, analytical look they use when they mean to project distance. But as Tony Blair's aide Peter Mendelsohn, speaking at the think tank discussion at which Mr. Gove appeared, said, "to decide is to divide." He was quoting Mr. Blair.

And the more decisive, the more divisive.

In the past week left-wing political groups held death parties, all heavily reported, and threatened to demonstrate at the funeral. The head of the London police seemed to invite them to come. (Less important, but worth mentioning: The White House embarrassed itself by not sending a delegation of high-level current officeholders. Did the British notice? Oh yes. It's another way they think we're slipping.)

All this—the media, the left—had the effect of telling people: you'll look stupid if you speak in support of Thatcher, you'll look sentimental, old. And it may be dangerous to attend the funeral—there could be riots!

I wonder if certain people pushed this line so hard so that the day after the funeral they could report no one came.

So then, the surprise that was a metaphor.

At the end of the funeral they all marched down the aisle in great procession—the family, the queen, the military pallbearers carrying the casket bearing the Union Jack. The great doors flung open, the pallbearers marched forward, and suddenly from the crowd a great roar. We looked at each other. Demonstrators? No. Listen. They were cheering. They were calling out three great hurrahs as the pallbearers went down the steps. Then long cheers and applause. It was electric.

England came. The people came. Later we would learn they'd stood 30 deep on the sidewalk, that quiet crowds had massed on the Strand and Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill. A man had held up a sign: "But We Loved Her."

"The end is where we start from." That is T.S. Eliot, whose "Little Gidding" she loved. When they died, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher were old and long past their height of power. Everyone was surprised when Reagan died that crowds engulfed the Capitol; people slept on sidewalks to view him in state. When John Paul died the Vatican was astonished to see millions converge. "Santo Subito."

And now at the end some came for Thatcher, too.

What all three had in common: No one was with them but the people.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, rest in peace.

[DougMacG]

http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/04/19/mit-police-officer-sean-collier-killed-the-line-duty-during-confrontation-with-marathon-bombing-suspects/okOsk0WUnFyGB1yQ6CxuBI/story.html

American flags began to appear on a cordoned-off block of Curtis Street as the news spread that 26-year-old Sean Collier, an MIT police officer who lived in a three-story house there, had been killed in a late-night confrontation with the two suspects in the deadly Boston Marathon bombing.

Through tears, his roommate — who trained with Collier at the police academy and did not provide his name — said Collier was “awesome,” his only fault being that was he was too brave.

“He was the guy who went to help,” his roommate said. “The best guy got shot down by the biggest scumbags.”

In a statement, Collier’s family expressed their grief.

“We are heartbroken by the loss of our wonderful and caring son and brother, Sean Collier,” the family wrote. “Our only solace is that Sean died bravely doing what he committed his life to — serving and protecting others. We are thankful for the outpouring of support and condolences offered by so many people.”

Expressions of love for Collier came from all corners of his life. MIT police chief John DiFava called Collier “a home run,” with every quality one could want in a police officer.

[bigdog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/us/politics/william-p-clark-influential-adviser-in-reagan-white-house-is-dead-at-81.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From the article:

William P. Clark, who as one of President Ronald Reagan’s most trusted advisers successfully nudged him toward more hard-line positions on military spending, arms control and involvement in Central America, died on Saturday at his ranch near Shandon, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Paul said.

During Reagan’s first term, Mr. Clark — who served as deputy secretary of state, national security adviser and secretary of the interior — was understood to be pre-eminent among presidential aides. Time magazine called him the second most powerful man in the White House

[bigdog]

Another of the old guard passes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/us/gen-david-c-jones-former-joint-chiefs-chairman-is-dead-at-92.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&partner=rss&emc=rss

From the article:

General Jones served longer than any predecessor on the Joint Chiefs, first as the Air Force chief of staff (1974-78) and then as chairman (1978-82). It was under his watch during the Carter administration that a mission to rescue 53 American hostages in Iran ended in disaster.

General Jones was a bomber pilot in the Korean War, but he represented a new generation of officers whose rise in the military hierarchy owed more to their administrative and strategic planning skills than to their combat exploits.

In “Four Stars,” his history of the Joint Chiefs published in 1989, Mark Perry wrote that General Jones had earned a reputation as “a good service manager” who “welcomed change” when he was selected as Air Force chief of staff by President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

[Crafty_Dog]

BD:

You beat me to putting up William Clark. 

A man of respect!

"The wood is consumed, but the fire burns on!"

[Crafty_Dog]

Click here to watch: Ariel Sharon Passes Away, Aged 85

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has passed away aged 85. He passed away with his family at his side at the Sheba Medical Center where he had been treated since not long after slipping into a coma in 2006. "The Sheba Medical Centre in Tel HaShomer announces with sorrow the passing of former prime minister Ariel Sharon that was determined approximately an hour ago," senior doctor Professor Shlomo Noy told a news conference at 1300 GMT. Sharon has been in a coma since January 4, 2006 after suffering a massive stroke. His condition took a sudden turn for the worse on New Year's Day when he suffered serious kidney problems after surgery. "He's gone; he went when he decided to go," his son Gilad told reporters at the hospital, in remarks on Channel 2 television. As news of his death emerged, tributes poured in from senior Israeli officials, but the Palestinians were quick to denounce him as a "criminal" who had escaped international justice. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel would "forever" cherish Sharon's memory."The State of Israel bows its head over the passing of former prime minister Ariel Sharon," he said in a statement, expressing "deep sorrow" over the news. "His memory will forever be held in the heart of the nation."

WATCH HERE

President Shimon Peres also expressed his grief. "My dear friend, Arik (Ariel) Sharon, lost his final battle today," he said in a statement. "Arik was a brave soldier and a daring leader who loved his nation and his nation loved him. He was one of Israel's great protectors and most important architects, who knew no fear and certainly never feared vision," he said. "He will be greatly missed." Justice Minister Tzipi Livni also expressed "great sadness" over his death."Arik was a man I loved. They say great soldiers don't die, they fade away. Arik faded eight years ago, and now finally left us," she said. He was a "brave fighter, a commander, a leader (and) a farmer whose legs were firmly planted in Israel's soil." A veteran soldier, Sharon fought in all of Israel's major wars before embarking on a turbulent political career in 1973 that ended dramatically when he suffered the stroke from which he never recovered. "Ariel Sharon was first and foremost a rare military leader who shaped the Israeli army," said Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon. "Despite the differences of opinion along the way, I always valued his experience and leadership. The defence establishment... bows its head today with his departure." In the months after the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon abandoned his lifelong political home in Likud to form a new centrist party, Kadima, with the aim of effecting further, but limited, pullouts from the West Bank. But just six weeks later, when he was at the height of his political career, he collapsed into the coma from which he would never recover.
Source: Arutz Sheva

[bigdog]

Indeed.

[DougMacG]

Prayers for the victims, families and friends of today's horrible massacre.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn

[bigdog]

https://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn

Indeed.

[Crafty_Dog]

He was definitely part of my experience growing up in New York City. 

[bigdog]

And a key role in my appreciation for free speech.

[DougMacG]

Dead at 97, former Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings.  For 6 terms he was mostly the junior Senator from South Carolina until Strom Thurmond died at age 100.  Hollings was considered a moderate and a pro-defense hawk.  A WWII veteran.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-us-sen-ernest-fritz-hollings-of-south-carolina-dead
---------------------------

Sen. Hollings, from the forum, documented a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein:
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=946.msg58009#msg58009

Sept 12 2002 Sen.Fritz Hollings D-S.C. entered a reprint from the Iraqi state newspaper before the attacks of Sept 11 2001 praising bin Laden and arguably names two of the targets of the attacks two months before the attacks.  Hollings, a Democrat, entered this in support of his decision to vote to authorize military action in Iraq.

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S8525&position=all

[DougMacG]

You made the nation worse in his own pursuit of power and fame.

Election analyst Sean Trende:
Perot forced Bush into a two-front war at a time where he needed to be hammering away at a badly wounded Clinton campaign.  He also elevated issues that were unfavorable for the Republican, most notably the deficit.

Ross Perot on what is wrong with General Motors (applies to most big companies)

Why haven't we unleashed their potential? The answer is: the General Motors system. It's like a blanket of fog that keeps these people from doing what they know needs to be done. I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is -- nothing. You figure, the snake hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let him crawl around on the factory floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it."
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/02/15/70199/index.htm

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/george-shultz-reagans-secretary-of-state-dies-at-100?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=midarticle_rec

[DougMacG]

Reagan biographer Steve Hayward

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/george-shultz-rip.php

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN HISTORY
GEORGE SHULTZ, RIP
There are not many of the giants of the late Cold War still among us, and today saw the passing of one of the greatest among them, Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, at the age of 100. Only Henry Kissinger and Lech Walesa come to mind as remaining peers of Shultz.

I only got to meet Shultz on a couple of occasions at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, long after the end of the Cold War. The last time was about three years ago when I was invited to a small meeting he hosted on energy policy—a late interest of his—although during lunch he mostly wanted to talk about nuclear weapons proliferation, which he regarded as still a serious threat to world peace and order.

I’ll leave readers to look into any of the complete obituaries going up this afternoon, and mention only what I regard as Shultz’s finest hour. We never knew until many years after he left office that the first thing he did every time he met a Soviet official was bring up a political prisoner, and demand that the Soviets release him. The Soviets always complained that such prisoners were purely internal matters and none of our business, but Shultz had none of it, pointing out that as the Soviets had signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, they had pledged to respect human rights, so we had all the standing we needed to hold them accountable. They didn’t like it.

But the best instance of Shultz standing up to the Soviets came the week after the USSR shot down Korean Air Line flight 007 in early September, 1983.

Shultz had a previously scheduled meeting with foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in Madrid on September 7, which he decided to keep. It ended up provoking the first tiny crack in Soviet diplomatic intransigence. By prior agreement Shultz was to host Gromyko at the American ambassador’s residence, but when Gromyko’s limousine pulled up to the house in front of a gallery of several hundred reporters and photographers, there was only a low-level State Department aide to greet Gromyko at the door. Shultz was pointedly absent. The meeting table was left spare, with not even a glass of water for Gromyko.  Shultz opened, as he deliberately did in every meeting with Gromyko, with a particular case of Soviet human rights abuse (in this instance, jailed dissident Anatoly Sharansky) as well as KAL 007.  Gromyko insisted that he would not discuss either subject, and rose from the table as if to walk out.  Shultz rose from the table, but made no effort to persuade Gromyko to stay; to the contrary, he called Gromyko’s bluff: “Fine—go,” Shultz said sharply.

Gromyko remained standing and kept talking; he didn’t want the blame for having ended the meeting abruptly.  At length he backed down and sat down, relenting on his refusal to allow Shultz to bring up his points about human rights and KAL 007. No real progress was made on the substance in the two hours of acrimonious back and forth that followed, and after the meeting ended Shultz went before the media outside and said, practically before Gromyko’s limousine was out the driveway, that Gromyko’s responses were “totally unacceptable.”  Shultz’s veteran State Department interpreter told him that in nearly two decades of participating in high-level meetings with Soviet officials, he had never seen such a blunt encounter.

[ccp]

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/77587-farewell-professor-shultz-2021-02-08

Kissinger has/had upmost praise for him

[DougMacG]

Shultz, it is clear, was enormously well grounded. He was said to make a point of inviting new ambassadors about to depart for their assignments into his vast office, walk them over to the globe, and spin it. As it spun he would invite them to point, as it slowed down, to their country. So the young ambassador would shortly point to wherever he or she was headed — Japan, say, or Uruguay or some other exotic spot.

“No,” Shultz would say. “That’s not your country.” Then he would spin the globe again and as it slowed he would suddenly stop it by pointing at America. “That’s your country,” he’d say. “And I don’t want you to forget it.”
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/george-shultz/91413/

[ccp]

the irony of that story compared
to today

[DougMacG]

the irony of that story compared
to today

In a famous scene from the 2004 movie Miracle, Coach Herb Brooks runs the team through conditioning drills following another lackluster performance in a game leading up to the Olympics.

[Brooks kept asking players who they played for and players kept answering with the college they came from.]

Exhausted, the team captain, Mike Eruzione, shouts out to the coach. In response, Coach Brooks asks, “Who do you play for?” The Captain replies, “I play for…the United States of America!”
https://arbingerinstitute.com/BlogDetail?id=111

[ccp]

https://www.foxnews.com/media/rush-limbaugh-dead-talk-radio-conservative-icon

I (we ) lost friend today

FU huff compost:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rush-limbaugh-talk-radio-dies_n_5fe4e082c5b66809cb30ad57

[DougMacG]

https://www.foxnews.com/media/rush-limbaugh-dead-talk-radio-conservative-icon

I (we ) lost friend today

FU huff compost:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rush-limbaugh-talk-radio-dies_n_5fe4e082c5b66809cb30ad57

[Doug] I called him the Hank Aaron of political analysis, meaning all time home run leader.  Both showed up for work everyday and hit home runs out of the park at a rate that nobody else in our lifetime did, within the rules, until he passed up Babe Ruth.  Rush was Babe Ruth too, and Lou Gehrig.

Rush had personality and hobbies and a good life, but mostly he was the guy who could look at the news of the day and tell you what was really happening, or what needed to happen.  Dittos means 'that's what I was thinking' and then you (Rush) said it, and said it better than almost anyone else can.
------------------------
Mark Steyn mentioned Monday that he had been part of the program for 15 years, nearly half the life of the show, which is about 33 years.  I think he knew then...     Steyn is the only guest host I like.  The rest are fine on policy or ideology by not educational or entertaining enough for me.
------------------------
https://www.steynonline.com/11078/the-indispensable-man

The Indispensable Man
Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021
by Mark Steyn
February 17, 2021

It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of Rush Limbaugh, a giant of American broadcasting, a uniquely talented performer, and a hugely generous man to whom I owe almost everything.

Rush died this morning, after a year-long struggle with lung cancer. I was scheduled to guest-host today's show. Instead, as you can hear, his beloved Kathryn will be introducing a special program put together by the EIB team to celebrate a great man's life and legacy. It's a hard thing to do - compressing a glorious third-of-a-century into three hours - but Snerdley, Kraig, Mike, Allie and everyone else I've worked with there for so many years will do their best.

Usually, in this line of work, if you're lucky, you get a moment - a year or two when you're the in-thing - and you hope to hold enough of that moment as it slowly fades away to keep you going till retirement. Rush did something unprecedented in the history of TV and radio. Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920: The Rush Limbaugh Show came along two-thirds of a century later, became the Number One program very quickly, and has stayed at the top all the way to today - for a third of the entire history of the medium. And throughout all those decades Rush and his show stayed exactly the same: a forensic breakdown of the day's news, punctuated by musical parodies, satirical sketches, and Rush's own optimism and good humor, even through this last terrible year.

The comedy is what his many enemies and half his own side missed: Rush took politics seriously but not solemnly. In the early years of the war on terror, he introduced an Afghan version of himself "with talent on loan from Allah" and sold Club Gitmo merchandise for those seeking a tropical retreat from jihad. When Brokeback Mountain was in the news, the show ran trailers for Return to Saddle-Sore Canyon: "It's John McCain and Lindsey Graham as you've always wanted to see them!" Which, in my case at least, is true.

I know precisely when I first heard Rush. It was not long after he started the show and not long after I bought my pad in New Hampshire. I was driving some visitors from London through the North Maine Woods toward New Brunswick in that dead zone where the only thing that comes in is the soft-and-easy station on 94.9 FM from the top of Mount Washington. And then that died, and there was nothing, and I forgot to switch it off so it was automatically scanning up and around the dial as we chit-chatted in the car. And then suddenly it found some guy, and there he was talking about "the arts-and-croissants crowd" moving into your town, and reading out press releases from NOW (the National Association of Women), whom he called the NAGS (National Association of Gals), and playing Andy Williams' version of "Born Free" punctuated by gunfire to accompany any environmental story.

And, in my car, conversation ceased. My friends were what you might call slightly skeptical lefties, so they disagreed with what Rush said on the issues but they were rapt by the way he said it. Because they had never heard anybody say it like that before. It was a unique combination - absolute piercing philosophical clarity, and a grand rollicking presentational style honed through all the lean years of minor-market disc-jockeying. First, he perfected the style, and then he applied it to the content. When Clinton was elected, Rush opened his shows, for years, with "America Held Hostage, Day Thirty-Nine... Day Seventy-Three... Day Hundred-and-Twenty Four...", and when Newt's Republicans won the 1994 mid-terms he started with James Brown singing "I Feel Good".

One man doing what he wanted to do saved an entire medium - AM radio - and turned all its old rules upside down: Traditionally, morning drive is your big audience, and everything tapers off from there. Rush figured that everyone needs a local guy at that time, with traffic and weather updates, and that the opportunity to build a national show lay in the hitherto somnolent slot of noon-to-three Eastern/nine-to-twelve Pacific. And within a couple of years hundreds of stations were building the entire schedule around the midday guy. In the scheme of things, I am not sure how many of those stations will be able to keep that going without him.

Throughout his entire time on air, there were genius GOP consultants who, in reaction to any electoral setbacks, would insist that what the GOP needed to do was come up with a way to ditch Limbaugh. As I said on air many years ago: Really? For almost a third of a century, Rush's audience was over half the total Republican vote. How many do all you genius "Republican reformers" bring to the table? I've recounted previously the first time I was asked to guest-host, back in 2006, when I happened to be down in Australia and the Prime Minister, John Howard, asked me to some or other event a day or two hence. And I politely declined, saying I had to get back to America to host The Rush Limbaugh Show. "I hear that's a pretty big show," said the PM.

"Yeah," I replied. "Twenty-five, thirty million listeners."

"'Strewth," said Mr Howard. "Rush has more listeners than we have Australians."

Indeed. And all these GOP clever-clogs never explain, once you throw Rush and his millions overboard, what's going to replace them.

Powerful politicians and longtime fans were often surprised, upon meeting him, to find a man who was quite private and indeed shy - because, like many radio guys, he had no desire to have a public persona other than at the microphone. Unlike so many others in this business, Rush was hugely generous and totally secure. Unlike other shows of left and right, where the staff come and go every six weeks, everyone at the EIB Network has been there fifteen, twenty, thirty years. That includes, in a very peripheral way, yours truly. When I first started guest-hosting, I found it odd that, on the rare occasions Rush mentioned the subs, it would be to put them down. Because, I mean, who would do that? But Rush is the least insecure star on the planet, and I came to see that he was actually teaching the neophytes a very important lesson: You guys need to be completely secure too - because it's the only way to survive in this wretched media. I came to appreciate that being put down by Rush was actually a far greater compliment than him doing some boilerplate hey-he's-a-great-guy shtick. And one of the saddest days of my fifteen years with EIB was when I heard Rush a few months back expressing genuine, sincere gratitude for something I'd said about him a few days earlier. As I pleaded on air, I just wanted the old Rush back scoffing at his guest-hosts - so we'd know all was well in the world.

So I owe Rush the biggest break of my career in America, and I owe him even more for sticking with me after the CRTV breach of contract when certain extremely prominent figures on the American right were bombarding him with multiple texts and emails to fire me from the guest-host's slot. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have gone along with that. But he didn't. And that's the only reason I'm still around today.

I have come to admire him even more this last year. When he announced his diagnosis, we all knew this story only has one ending, and it's just a question of how many chapters there are leading up to it. Rush loved what he did more than anything in life except his family. He had no interest in going to Tahiti to watch the sunset. He wanted to be behind the Golden EIB Microphone every day that he could. So initially he took a couple of days off every three weeks for treatment, and then the two days became four, and the treatment weeks took their toll and spilled into the following week. But, through it all, he remained determined to do every single show he could - because, aside from anything else, he wanted to make sure he, his listeners, his brand, his stations did everything they could to put President Trump across the finish line on November 3rd.

Events didn't quite turn out the way he wanted - although they might have if more people had worked as hard as a man ravaged by Stage IV cancer did, in defiance of his doctors' prognostications. The last three months, when he and Kathryn had surely earned those Tahitian sunsets, took a terrible toll. But he stayed on the air until just a fortnight ago - because above all he wanted to keep faith with tens of millions of listeners, many of whom had been listening to him their entire lives and could not imagine a world without him.

We are about to find out.

I am well aware of the ironies of the headline. My father liked to caution me with the old saw that the graveyard is full of indispensable men. But, as the conventional bias of the legacy media yielded to something far more severe from the woke billionaires of Social Media, Rush remained the Big Voice on the Right, the largest obstacle to the complete marginalization of conservative ideas in our culture. All of us who labored in his shadows owe it to him to continue the fight.

To modify Rush's tag line: Talent returned to God.

[DougMacG]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2003/08/rush-leader-opposition-james-bowman/

[Crafty_Dog]

R.I.P., P. J. O’Rourke

By the standards of the American political culture of 2022, P. J. O’Rourke seems like an impossible figure: a libertarian-conservative writer known first and foremost for being hilarious, who wrote for the biggest and most mainstream publications — Vanity Fair, Playboy, House and Garden, Inquiry, Car and Driver, Men’s Journal, The Atlantic. The New Republic ran excerpts of his speeches. He became the “Foreign Affairs Desk Chief” at Rolling Stone — he wrote that he had that title because “Middle-Aged Drunk” didn’t look good on a business card. He was briefly a commentator on CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and he appeared on The Tonight Show. When the U.S. sent troops to Saudi Arabia in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, ABC Radio sent him to Saudi Arabia to cover it.

None of those publications or institutions were eager or itching to give valuable space to a conservative writer. None of those publications thought of themselves as conservative or felt much of an obligation to give a conservative voice “equal time.” But O’Rourke was just too darn good to reject — too funny, too insightful, too fair and accurate in the shots he took at the other side, too honest to deny that Republicans often exhibited the same petty, small-minded, self-aggrandizing traits that he disdained in Democrats. He had no pretensions, mocked himself as much as he mocked everyone else, and just about every time he started typing, he nailed this tone of exasperated normalcy, this attitude of witty, snarky, irreverent incredulity with a sharp undertone of “Get out of my face.”

Back in 2010, The Guardian contended that O’Rourke’s position was unique; he had become the right-of-center voice whom left-of-center people enjoyed reading and listening to, even when they disagreed with him:

For many leftwingers PJ O’Rourke occupies a unique position. The famed American humorist and once notoriously hard-living journalist is the Republican that you liked. His caustic wit and warm humanity shone through his writing even when he was attacking your most firmly held political beliefs. Also, he loved a drink and wrote for cool magazines like National Lampoon and Rolling Stone. He seemed like he would be a lot of fun to prop up a bar with.

Perhaps it was O’Rourke’s status as a former long-haired hippie that bought him so much goodwill from the not-so-conservative mainstream, and a de facto hall pass for deviating from the leftist counterculture attitudes of his youth. And wow, did O’Rourke turn against his youthful views. He dedicated Give War a Chance, his 1992 book primarily about the Persian Gulf War, to the man who went to Vietnam because he didn’t. “I hope you got back in one piece, fellow. I hope you were more use to your platoon mates than I would have been. I hope you’re rich and happy now. And in 1971, when somebody punched me in the face for being a long-haired peace creep, I hope that was you.”

There’s regret, there’s deep regret, and then there’s “I’m glad somebody punched me in the face” regret.

Speaking of punching, O’Rourke almost always punched up — unlike some other celebrated satirists of our age. Smug politicians, tin-pot dictators, Saudi royals, celebrities, pretentious corporate CEOs who thought they knew how to reorganize American society — O’Rourke skewered them all. He wrote that Chrysler chief executive Lee Iacocca was “a hero for our time — a conceited big-mouth glad-handing huckster who talked the government into loaning his company piles of money. And Iacocca: An Autobiography is literature for our time. That is, it stinks.”

The Guardian piece mentions that, “Needless to say, he has never been a hit with the family values wing of the Republican party,” and O’Rourke never hid his youthful drug use or running around. You get the feeling he never wanted the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Jimmy Swaggart to start making policy decisions. But if he was a libertine, he was no hypocrite about it, and he rejected everyone else’s simple answers. In a Vanity Fair profile of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, O’Rourke wrote, “Life is not simple, let alone love. Maybe guilt and fear actually increase sexual desire. They did in the backseats of cars when I was younger. Or maybe the very obscurity of sex solders the bond between lovers.”

But for all the cigar-smoking, jokes about hangovers, and reminiscences about sex with easy hippie chicks, O’Rourke seemed quite comfortable when he settled into the pleasures of domestic tranquility and fatherhood. From his 2011 Weekly Standard piece about being an “Irish Setter Dad,” in contrast to the then-trendy talk about “Tiger Moms”:

I just wasn’t cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I’m more of an Irish Setter Dad. Here are some of the things my daughters, Muffin and Poppet, and my son, Buster, were never allowed to do:

go to Mass naked
attend a sleepover at Charlie Sheen’s house
mix Daddy a martini using sweet vermouth
play the violin within earshot of me
Have you ever heard a kid learning to play the violin? A cat in the microwave is nothing to it. And let me add an addendum to the things my children were never allowed to do — put a cat in the microwave. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m just saying they weren’t allowed to do it.

And yikes, does O’Rourke’s best work still ring true today. From the introduction to Give War a Chance:

The principal feature of contemporary American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. People who care a lot are naturally superior to we who don’t care any more than we have to. By virtue of this superiority, the caring have a moral right to lead the nation. It’s a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don’t have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

Wait, he’s just getting started!

Liberals actually hate wealth because they hate all success. They hate success especially, of course, when it’s achieved by other people, but sometimes they hate the success they achieve themselves. What’s the use of belonging to a self-selecting elite if there’s a real elite around? Liberals don’t like any form of individual achievement. . . . Also wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religious practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren’t very interested in such real and material freedoms. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words, and to expose their private parts in art museums.

Comic exaggeration, sure, but there’s 55-gallon drums of truth in there. You see it in the way that Democratic politicians hate to admit that they’re rich. You see it in the way that progressives fume about the “semi-rich,” the “upper-middle class,” “the 9.9 percent,” and “status-income disequilibrium” — when a progressive has a high social status but a modest income. Progressives want to live the Bernie Sanders dream — spend your whole life working in government, never compromise your principles, and end up as a socialist with a net worth of $3 million, owning three houses.

The passage of P. J. O’Rourke is a grim reminder of how much our culture has changed from when he burst upon the scene in the 1970s, and of the cultural waters he thrived in until very recently. The urge to “cancel” those deemed controversial by the Left means that what little “irreverence” remains picks on only familiar, tired targets — Donald Trump, hicks, boring middle-class white people, bumbling suburban dads, Christians. The room for dissent can now be measured in microns; Joe Rogan is a pot-smoking Bernie Sanders voter who calls Christianity mythology, and somehow, he’s become the modern Left’s Public Enemy No. 1.

O’Rourke has no natural or obvious successor — and while a huge part of that is because he was immensely talented, another reason is that vast swaths of mainstream-media culture don’t want another O’Rourke — an extremely likable, sharp-minded guy who reminds the audience that those conservatives have a point. I ran across an essay which argued that O’Rourke’s mockery of the Left never changed anything and never did any real harm to leftist causes. But if O’Rourke’s ridicule was really so harmless to modern progressivism . . . why did voices such as his disappear from mainstream institutions?

[DougMacG]

https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status/1494268466446192644

Bo Snerdley remembers, greatest of all time in his field.

[ccp]

Mark Levin had a nice piece at end of his show last night.

He has total admiration and respect.
And like everyone I have heard who  speaks about Rush says in private he was an extremely kind loving man.

He concluded there will never be anyone like him again.

I find my self thinking when I listen to his replacements how it is not close to being the same.
I miss Rush's unique perspectives and true insight logic and persuasion skills .

He was. a genius with talent from God.

[DougMacG]

ccp: I find my self thinking when I listen to his replacements how it is not close to being the same.
I miss Rush's unique perspectives and true insight logic and persuasion skills .
------------------------------------------------------------
People who didn't listen to Rush thought his listeners just follow his words like sheep.  They projected in that they were only repeating what others who also didn't listen were saying.

Rush added a deeper understanding to things and with his skills helped listeners communicate their own ideas better.  I called him the Hank Aaron, all time home run leader (before steroids), of political analysis and commentary.  When something crazy happened in the country or the world, you knew he was the guy that could hit it out of the park.

For most other radio hosts, I may find them sufficiently in agreement with me on issues but they don't add much to my understanding.  For Rush's replacements, I like one more than the other.  For me, they spend too much time on covid, masks and vaccinations.  Yes, it's the issue of the moment, but it also is the shiny object making us look away from many other important things.  (cf. the many topics on the forum)  I may agree with what they say, but it doesn't benefit me enough to turn on the show or keep it on.

As expected, the world is worse off without Rush.

[ccp]

"I may agree with what they say, but it doesn't benefit me enough to turn on the show or keep it on."

precisely
I nod yes
heard them say what I already know
then turn the station off

I learn nothing

There are really very few people I learn from

Let's see

Dinesh Disouza
VDH
Newt
Tucker
Gordon Chang
General Keane
Mark Levin

off the top of my head

[ccp]

I would also one other person

you may find odd:

Radio talk show
Bill O'Reilly

[Crafty_Dog]

I have not read this yet:

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile-cold-war-henry-kissinger-indonesia-southern-cone-vietnam/2023-11-29/henry?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=90f233fa-4021-41f5-b85d-dd7b1a85b308

Trivia:  My International Relations prof was William Quandt, who headed the Middle East desk at the NSC under Kissinger.

[ccp]

I liked him and respected his opinions
though many anti war protesters hate him
he was sharp to the end
next 100 yo up is Jimmy Carter

he had good taste is women!

being associated with Nixon did not help his memory any.
I am still not 100 % convinced the Nixon thing was not simply a left wing media frenzy hit job
BTW.

[Crafty_Dog]

Henry A. Kissinger, 1923-2023
The former Secretary of State was a master of grand strategy in the perilous Cold War era.
By
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Nov. 30, 2023 10:05 am ET


At a dinner recently with friends, Henry Kissinger was, at the invitation of his host as usual, holding forth on various world crises when he was asked what gave him reason for optimism. He replied that he had confidence in the wisdom of the American people, though at the current moment he worried about a dearth of U.S. leadership.

The comment reflected Kissinger’s abiding faith in America tempered with political realism and his belief in the essential role of leaders in guiding nations. The U.S. offered him refuge from Nazi Germany as a child and provided the opportunity to become one of its greatest statesmen. Henry Alfred Kissinger, who died Wednesday at age 100, leaves a legacy of accomplishment and strategic insight about global politics that few have matched.

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Kissinger was 15 when his family arrived as Jewish refugees in 1938. By the end of World War II he was back in Germany with the U.S. Army. He would go on to study at Harvard, where he made a reputation as a nuclear and geopolitical strategist and caught the attention of the prominent Republican politician, Nelson Rockefeller.

His writing was also noticed by Richard Nixon, who made him national security adviser after he won the White House in 1968. The two men proceeded to reshape the global order by ending the Vietnam War, managing conflict in the Middle East in a way that reduced Soviet influence, and negotiating an opening to Mao Zedong that pulled Communist China from the Soviet orbit. It’s hard to believe now, but Kissinger’s official time in power was only eight years, from 1969-1977. He became Secretary of State under Nixon and then Gerald Ford until Ford’s defeat in 1976.

Kissinger was a target of both the right and left in those perilous Cold War years, often unfairly. His 1973 peace agreement with North Vietnam that ended the U.S. participation in the war is often mocked because the North overran the South two years later.

But Kissinger and Nixon inherited the unpopular war from Lyndon Johnson and had little choice other than to manage U.S. withdrawal. Kissinger’s strategy was to negotiate a settlement that allowed the South to take over its own defenses without half a million U.S. troops. He achieved his peace settlement and won a controversial Nobel Peace Prize for it. But the strategy collapsed when the U.S. Congress slashed aid to the South in 1975. Saigon fell within weeks. A Senator named Joe Biden was among those voting to abandon the South.

Kissinger has long argued, rightly we think, that the South would have survived if Congress hadn’t abandoned support. And Lee Kuan Yew, the late leader of Singapore, often said that U.S. support for South Vietnam gave the countries of Southeast Asia the time to build resistance to Communists in their countries. They are freer today because of it.

The left also blames Kissinger for supporting dictators. But the alternatives then, as now, weren’t usually democrats of the left’s imagining. They were often Communists who would have aligned themselves with the Soviets, as Fidel Castro did in Cuba.

In Chile, for example, Salvador Allende won a presidential election with 37% of the vote and took the country sharply to the left with Cuban and Soviet intelligence and other aid. The U.S. provided covert aid to Allende’s political opponents, but declassified briefings from the time show the U.S. was unaware of the military coup that deposed him.

Kissinger wasn’t responsible for Augusto Pinochet’s coup or its bloody excesses. Chile eventually became a democracy and free-market success. Cuba remains a dictatorship.

***
These pages sometimes disagreed with Kissinger, notably over détente and arms control with the Soviet Union. Wearing his realist hat, Kissinger believed with Nixon that the world system needed a stable U.S.-Russian relationship in the nuclear age, and arms control was his main lever for achieving it.

His diplomacy succeeded, but his strategic arms and anti-ballistic-missile treaties didn’t contain Soviet ambitions. The 1972 ABM treaty in particular hamstrung U.S. missile defenses until George W. Bush withdrew from it. Kissinger underestimated American strength while overestimating the economic resilience of the Soviet system.

Ronald Reagan saw Soviet weakness more plainly and combined an arms buildup with a more idealistic declaration of the moral defects of the “evil empire.” Kissinger would later tell us that he came to appreciate that U.S. foreign policy, to be successful, had to combine realism with American ideals.

Kissinger was certainly the most influential former American official in history, advising U.S. Presidents and other officials for decades. Foreign leaders sought his counsel, and he often served as an unofficial deliverer of messages between leaders. He was criticized in particular for being soft on China, but in our experience he had no illusions about the Communist Party or its nationalist ambitions. His view was that the U.S. and China had to achieve some modus vivendi to avoid war despite their profound cultural and political differences.

***
He continued to write until his final days, and his many books repay careful reading about the fate of nations. His 2022 book, “Leadership,” uses six 20th-century figures he knew, including Nixon, Charles de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher, to offer lessons in strategy. One of his epigrams is that a great leader is someone who takes a nation where it needs to go even when its people don’t realize they need to get there.

In his last decade Kissinger developed a fascination with the potential of artificial intelligence—with more than a little foreboding. His February essay in this newspaper with two co-authors raised profound questions about what the rise of machines, and especially advanced generative AI, means for humanity.

For those of us who knew Henry Kissinger, his humanity indeed stood out. He was always willing to help with advice, and he informed many of the writers you read on these pages. America was lucky to have him, as he was to have America.

[Crafty_Dog]

Henry Kissinger’s Century
As national security adviser and secretary of state, he combined grand strategy with indefatigable ‘shuttle diplomacy’ and an ability to read his foreign counterparts.
By Niall Ferguson
Nov. 29, 2023 9:33 pm ET


No U.S. secretary of state ever achieved such celebrity while in office as Henry Kissinger. A 1974 Newsweek cover depicted him as “Super K,” a comic-book hero. Time called him “the world’s indispensable man.” Gallup ranked him America’s most admired man. A 1972 Life magazine spread pictured him with a bevy of actresses, including Jill St. John.

Yet no former secretary of state has been more vehemently criticized. Of the many anti-Kissinger books, the most influential was Christopher Hitchens’s “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), which explicitly accused Kissinger of responsibility for “war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places”—although the book mentioned only one other supposed crime scene, Bangladesh, and mentioned the Soviet Union a mere three times. These accusations stuck like mud—late in life, Kissinger regularly faced protests at his public appearances—yet they are at odds with the historical record.

Kissinger served Presidents Nixon and Ford as White House national security adviser and secretary of state—holding both positions between September 1973 and November 1975. He was the first naturalized citizen in either office. His accomplishments include the negotiation of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, the cease-fire in the Yom Kippur War, and the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, for which he and North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

These were no small achievements for a man who arrived in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, studied at night and sold shaving brushes during the day, and served in the Army during World War II, first in the infantry, then in counterintelligence. Like many Jewish refugees, Kissinger might have been content with an academic career. He thrived at Harvard, where he wrote a portentous senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” and a brilliant doctoral thesis on the post-Napoleonic European balance of power.

Yet Kissinger aspired to wider influence. His 1957 book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” launched his career as a public intellectual. With its contrarian argument for “limited nuclear war,” the book was well-timed for the crisis of American confidence that followed the Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik.

Kissinger became politically influential in the 1960s as New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s principal foreign-policy adviser. When Rockefeller lost his final bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, Kissinger seemed destined to return to academia. Instead Richard Nixon—Rockefeller’s archrival—named Kissinger national security adviser.

“But Kissinger is a professor,” Dwight Eisenhower objected. “You ask professors to study things, but you never put them in charge of anything.” That proved one of Ike’s rare misjudgments: Kissinger swiftly showed himself to be a skillful bureaucrat. He maintained proximity to—and had regular conversations with—the reclusive, thin-skinned president. Just as important, he built an eclectic social network, including the journalist brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

Yet Kissinger’s real contribution was as a strategist and negotiator. Asked in 1976 to assess his own statesmanship, he replied: “I have tried—with what success historians will have to judge—to have an overriding concept.” He combined grand strategy with indefatigable “shuttle diplomacy” and an ability to read his foreign counterparts.

Nixon’s inheritance from Lyndon B. Johnson was unenviable. The U.S. was mired in Vietnam, overcommitted yet seemingly losing. The Soviet Union was expanding its influence, from the Middle East to South America, and winning the nuclear arms race. The grand strategy of the Nixon administration was to “Vietnamize” the ground war by rapidly drawing down U.S. troops and shifting the emphasis to strategic bombing of the North, while at the same time seeking to exploit the Sino-Soviet split.

In 1972 the administration achieved what Kissinger called “three out of three”: Nixon’s February visit to China, the May Moscow summit, and Kissinger’s October breakthrough with Le Duc Tho in Paris. On the phone to Nixon, Kissinger spoke of having “set up this whole intricate web. When we talked about linkage, everyone was sneering.”

In pursuit of this strategic trifecta, Kissinger was prepared to sacrifice smaller pieces on the chessboard. Pakistan took precedence over India and East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh), because Islamabad was the key conduit to Beijing. South Vietnam and Taiwan found that the U.S. was a fickle ally. Kissinger’s many critics focused on the human costs of strategic decisions that were, Kissinger long argued, inevitably choices between evils.

Nixon’s downfall had paradoxical implications for Kissinger. On the one hand, it made him even more powerful. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, Nixon was so preoccupied with his domestic travails that Kissinger was essentially in charge. Yet Congress’s assertions of power in Watergate’s aftermath ultimately doomed the attempt to avoid dishonor in Vietnam. The 1975 fall of Saigon was a bitter pill.

At the time of Watergate, the French political philosopher Raymond Aron warned Kissinger: “You’d better pray for [Nixon’s] survival, because the minute he goes they’ll come after you.” That proved prescient.

In the 1970s it was conservatives, from William F. Buckley to California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who found fault with the policy of détente with Moscow and Beijing. As the Cold War drew to a close and Reagan embraced his own version of détente, the left’s critique of Kissinger grew louder. After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, it became easier to denounce the lesser evils the U.S. had committed during the Cold War. Yet other administrations also faced such choices, preferred military dictators to Marxists, and sent American forces into foreign countries.

The disproportionate harshness of the attacks on Kissinger wasn’t entirely unexpected to him, and not only because of his early experiences of antisemitism. As a young historian, he had been keenly aware of the near-impossibility of a popular foreign policy. Writing about Prince Metternich in his first book, “A World Restored” (1957), Kissinger noted that statesmen tend to have a “tragic quality,” because “it is in the nature of successful policies that posterity forgets how easily things might have been otherwise. . . . The statesman is therefore like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men.”

Unwittingly, the young Kissinger had written his own epitaph.

Mr. Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author of “Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist.”

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/henry-kissinger-cold-war-foreign-policy-visionary-dies-at-100/

[Crafty_Dog]

second
    
Remembering Henry Kissinger
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Henry Kissinger has died at age 100. He was never a man who could be mourned, nor one who would pass away quietly. I had a passing relationship with him – insignificant to him, vital to me. We first met in Washington when I was young, and he properly lectured me on my hubris. I think he sensed the irony of accusing someone else of the hubris many held him to be guilty of, but then he was a man who knew everyone worth knowing. It was a solid understanding of his worth. We met a number of times thereafter, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes by chance. The meetings took place mostly in his office on Park Avenue, once in the Bahamas, a few times in some other places. I can’t recall the exact dates, but I remember what we discussed, and I know I was young.

At the time, my company was called Stratfor, and I was stunned to discover he read our work. A subordinate of his approached me and proposed that Stratfor merge with Kissinger Associates. Kissinger swallowed heads of state, so I knew he would make short work of me. My wife pointed out in my support that the merger could lead to nuclear war.

Kissinger said that he liked talking to me because we thought alike. I politely disagreed with him a number of times, but it felt absurd to challenge him. Yet we were not alike. Kissinger saw the world in terms of people. He knew people and tried to influence what they’d do. I see people as prisoners of geopolitical realities and set as my goal understanding those realities without thinking it can be influenced by understanding a leader’s soul. More, Kissinger wanted power, which he wielded well after he left the government. I saw power as an illusion. History does not move on good or bad will. He once chided me on the life I led and for not seeking power and influence. I said that I have the privilege of seeing the secrets of the world first. He didn’t understand, but then I didn’t understand him.

There was a bond in our small relationship. We were both children of the Holocaust, both brought to the United States by our parents and grew up a few miles apart, although at different times. I think the Holocaust taught him to survive by being close to dangerous people. I responded by trying to understand the future. We were both refugees ready to be one again if needed.

I don’t mean for this column to be about me. I just think it’s appropriate that when a man who will be remembered dies, we contribute even the smallest of things to his memory.

[Crafty_Dog]

He is not a fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfcMW1OEw4o

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https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile-cold-war-henry-kissinger-indonesia-southern-cone-vietnam/2023-11-29/henry?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=90f233fa-4021-41f5-b85d-dd7b1a85b308

[ccp]

well if you don't think KAmala is not that person you are a racist bigoted white man supremacist

 

[Crafty_Dog]

Is this the thread you were looking for?

[ccp]

 

I was responding to a Doug post.  I have no idea I did not notice it was from 10 yrs ago when Margaret Thatcher died.  Was wondering why this (I thought) was posted yesterday.

God, I hope my mind is not losing it ala Biden.   

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Posts: 17702
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Re: Lady Margaret Thatcher
« Reply #49 on: April 08, 2013, 07:41:19 AM »
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 08, 2013, 05:34:41 AM
I had tremendous respect for her.

Yes.  She led Britain to a miraculous comeback, was President Reagan's equal and partner in leading the world toward freedom.  She started two years ahead of him.  These were historic times, standing up to the Soviet Union at its peak of power and standing up for economic freedom at home.  She was alway the obvious answer to the question of whether a woman could be President of the United States.  We can only hope to have a leader that great.

[Crafty_Dog]

One of my running jokes now is that my memory is of "presidential caliber"

[DougMacG]

Kamala is not destined to be the next Margaret Thatcher.  She may be President soon but she won't be a leader at all much less a transformational one.

Memory (or intellect) of "presidential caliber" is a good one - in a sad sort of way.  Imagine if this doorknob we call President was a Republican...
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I have already borrowed that line, memory of Presidential caliber.

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[ccp]

"Memory (or intellect) of "presidential caliber" is a good one - in a sad sort of way.  Imagine this doorknob we call President was a Republican..."

voters were right the first 3 times he ran - he is awful

thanks to Obama and the Dem shysters and media we got him in the end anyway.