Expect slow blogging the rest of the week while I’m giving thanks by stuffing my face, so here’s Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Thanksgiving address.
“It’s people, not government, who create wealth and provide growth.”
Quite a contrast with current occupant of the White House…
More on the late Margaret Thatcher:
“I am not a consensus politician. I’m a conviction politician.”
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Britain was a disaster: The lights frequently went out, trash was piled up in the streets, and the IMF was called in to bail the treasury out — in response to which the civil service decided that their role was to “manage” Britain’s decline and fall….’Diversity’ types are amusingly silent about her — and for good reason, as her example is utterly lethal to the culture of victimhood on which they rely. The global Left, likewise, has strong motives to disparage her: She realized that decline was a choice….She was right and they were wrong. While they blathered, she helped to defeat Communism, restored democracy to the Falklands, and saved Britain from the reds at home. She was, without doubt, our finest post-war premier and she made an incalculable contribution to the life of my country of birth.
Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight.
Thatcher on Socialism
Announcing the invasion of the Falklands
Her statement on European integration (“No! No! No!”).
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
Thatcher on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line:
On the danger of the Euro:
It’s been a rough week for conservatives, so by way of some cheering up, here’s the best of Ronald Reagan, so you can remember what a real president sounds like.
Warning: Sound gets a little sappy and out-of-hand.
Alphecca linked this interesting article on The Secret History of Guns. It talks about some of the ironies of gun control, such as the Black Panthers enthusiastically embracing the 2nd Amendment, while California Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law limiting the bearing of arms in government buildings.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of author Adam Winkler’s conclusions (such as they are), but he makes an interesting historical case, though I am not an expert. I would be interested to hear the take of some of the more prominent gun bloggers and historians on the piece.