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Mark Steyn gets his turn with Margaret Thatcher.
… In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail . . . The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.
Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.
Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable?
And, even when Mrs. Thatcher won her victory, the civilizational cringe of the West was so strong that all the experts immediately urged her to throw it away and reward the Argentine junta for its aggression. “We were prepared to negotiate before” she responded, “but not now. We have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood.” Or as a British sergeant said of the Falklands: “If they’re worth fighting for, then they must be worth keeping.”
Mrs. Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, at a time when everyone else assumed decline was inevitable. …
Roger Simon posts on Alan Dershowitz’s slam of America’s second to the worst prez and worst ex-prez.
Alan Dershowitz can be a frustrating man, but when he is good, he is very, very good.
I witnessed his courage personally a few years back when I was part of delegation with him at the Durban II Conference in Geneva. Dershowitz was a one-man resistance band then, protesting the speech of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at that UN-sponsored festival of anti-Semitism. (Well, he did have a few of us in support, but Dersh definitely led the way.)
I will skip past some of his iffier moments of Obama-induced backsliding to the present day when the Harvard professor has again stepped forward, this time to protest the decision of YeshivaUniversity’s Cardozo School of Law to give its annual “International Advocate for Peace” award to U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Dershowitz told The Algemeiner in an interview: “I can’t imagine a worse person to honor for conflict resolution. Here’s a man who has engendered conflict wherever he goes. He has encouraged terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah. He was partly responsible for Yasser Arafat turning down the Clinton-Barak peace offer.”
“He is significantly responsible for the second Intifada,” Dershowitz went on. “If he had told Yasser Arafat to accept that deal we might be celebrating Palestinian statehood today. He just prefers terrorists to Israelis.”
Okay, Dersh, how do you really feel? …
Jonathan Tobin gets to slam Fareed Zakaria. If Israel did not exist, we would have to invent a country that would allow us to spot all the leftist creeps.
Last summer television personality and columnist Fareed Zakaria was suspended by both TIME magazine and CNN for committing plagiarism in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post. Yet the ubiquitous voice of conventional wisdom about foreign policy was soon back in his familiar haunts undaunted by his humiliation and allowed to pretend as if nothing had happened. But the problem with Zakaria wasn’t his lack of acknowledgement of the work of others so much as it is his penchant for ignoring inconvenient facts when advocating the policies that he urges the country to adopt as if they were self-evident.
A particularly egregious example of this trait was made clear last month when Zakaria was writing about President Obama’s trip to Israel. Zakaria wrote a column that endorsed the president’s speech to Israeli youth to pressure their government to make peace with the Palestinians. While, as we pointed out at the time, this appeal was directed to the wrong side of the dispute, Zakaria was entitled to his opinion about Israelis ought to do. What he was not entitled to was his own facts about the situation.
Zakaria wrote the following in support of his belief that the Israelis should go the extra mile and start making concessions:
“After all, Israel has ruled millions of Palestinians without offering them citizenship or a state for 40 years.”
As anyone who has paid even cursory attention to the conflict in the last generation, this is patently false. …
Andrew Malcolm posts on a special election in Chicago.
Despite the endorsement of President Obama, Robin Kelly easily won election Tuesday night in a special House election to represent Illinois’ troubled Second Congressional District.
The sprawling urban-suburban district, containing Chicago’s ugly South Side, was formerly represented by Jesse Jackson Jr., who like a number of Illinois politicians will be residing in a federal penitentiary for a while.
In fact, the last three incumbents of the Second District’s seat have moved on to prison cells, as have some recent governors. But that could just be coincidence.
(The Second District is not to be confused with the Fifth District, which is on the North Side. The Fifth was formerly held by the late Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, a powerful House committee chairman who went on to prison. He was succeeded by Rod Blagojevich, who went on to prison, but not before becoming governor with the campaign help of Obama and his Fifth District successor Rahm Emanuel, who is now the mayor and has not been convicted of anything yet.) …
If Malcolm doesn’t get you thinking Chicago is a pretty gross place, try this from the Sun Times’ Southtown Star. It is about the indictment of Jeremiah Wright’s daughter.
The daughter of President Barack Obama’s former pastor was indicted Wednesday on charges of money laundering and lying to federal investigators in an expanding 2009 state grant-fraud case.
Jeri L. Wright, daughter of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was accused of participating in a fraud scheme allegedly orchestrated by former Country Club Hills Police Chief Regina Evans and her husband involving a $1.25 million state job-training grant geared toward minorities.
Jeri Wright, 47, of Hazel Crest, was charged with two counts of money laundering, two counts of making false statements to federal law enforcement officers and seven counts of giving false testimony before a grand jury.
A federal grand jury handed down the multi-pronged indictments Wednesday that accused Jeri Wright of engaging in a series of bank transactions in November 2009 in which she cashed more than $27,800 in checks drawn from the bank account of a non-profit the Evans controlled and from which the state funds had been deposited. …