My favorite phrase from this essay: "To the extent that there’s an intellectual foundation for Trumpism . . ."

Very amusing.

There's a lot riding on the outcome of the Hungarian elections for certain "conservatives" next week. 

 Meet the MAGA Intellectual on Hungary’s Payroll: A political theorist who once prophesized a Queen Melania is Viktor Orbán’s envoy to the court of Trump

It's mostly about Gladden Pappin, but is useful for describing the connections between Hungary and other American figures like J. D. Vance, and also the Danube Institute bankrolling Rod Dreher (unmentioned), helmed by National Review veteran John O'Sullivan:

Another English-speaking member of this species is John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. O’Sullivan is the founder and president of the Danube Institute, which receives funding from Orbán’s government and stays relentlessly on message. Last year, the institute put on an event called Is Transgenderism Dying?” With nearly two weeks to go before the election on April 12, the institute hosted a summit featuring a video address by the deputy U.S. secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and in-person remarks from one of his advisers. Weeks earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had traveled to Budapest and told Orbán, “Your success is our success.” The Danube Institute event reinforced that message by giving U.S. diplomats pride of place in the program. “It’s very comforting to know that we have allies like you,” an institute employee told the Americans at the conference’s conclusion.  

Speaking of Margaret Thatcher, "right-wing" candidate for Japan PM backs "hardline conservative" policies of easy money and aggressive spending of it LOL

"Let''s devalue the Yen and spend the hell out of it"

 

Right-wing Sanae Takaichi is set to be Japan’s first female prime minister

Japan’s ruling party picked hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi as its head on Saturday, putting her on course to become the country’s first female prime minister in a move set to jolt investors and neighbors. ...

Takaichi, who says her hero is Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, offers a starker vision for change than Koizumi and is potentially more disruptive.

An advocate of late premier Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” strategy to boost the economy with aggressive spending and easy monetary policy, she has previously criticized the Bank of Japan’s interest rate increases. ...

It's obviously the nationalism, anti-globalism, and possible militarism which really bother the writer from Reuters:

... But her nationalistic positions — such as her regular visits to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, viewed by some Asian countries as a symbol of its past militarism — may rile neighbors like South Korea and China. ...

Takaichi also favors revising Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution and suggested this year that Japan could form a “quasi-security alliance” with Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China. ...

“We hope she will ... steer Japanese politics in an ‘anti-globalism’ direction to protect national interests and help the people regain prosperity and hope,” Sanseito said in a statement.

 

If Japan really wanted to scare the world, maybe it could peg the Yen to the price of plutonium, the vast majority of which in the world it owns, and start aggressively selling it to the highest bidders. 

 

"That will teach them"

 

 

 

 

 

 

It never occurs to homo Andrew Sullivan that Christianity in Great Britain has already been replaced by, well, himself

 

... The fart in a coffin [his high school classmate, PM Keir Starmer] did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British. ...

More.

The new archbishop of Canterbury, first among equals of the Church of England, is a woman. And not just any woman, but a self-described liberal, feminist, dyslexic [one of us! one of us!], supporter of fetus-murdering and LGBT. It's not like she's Margaret Thatcher for God's sake.

That's not Christianity. 

How utterly lost is the left, he asks.

How utterly lost is he. 

Nowadays socialism is dressed up as billions of taxpayer dollars given to chipmakers

 

Speaking of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she was the one responsible for backing down on Hong Kong, giving it back to China in 1984

 She won in the Falklands, but folded on China.

Thatcher later recounted that Deng had told her directly "I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon," to which she replied, "There is nothing I could do to stop you, but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like."

More.

In old global warming news, it turns out that it was Margaret Thatcher of all people who first funded the warmists

 As you can see, today's posts so far show a pattern: Elect women leaders at your peril.

Phyllis Schlafly passed away yesterday: The 1992 Illinois Mother of the year who almost single-handedly defeated the ERA

Ann Coulter remembers the woman without whom Goldwater and Reagan conservatism might never have been born, here:

Though conservative women in later generations are often compared to Schlafly, all of us combined could never match the titanic accomplishments of this remarkable woman. Schlafly is unquestionably one of the most important people of ... the twentieth century – and a good part of the twenty-first. Among her sex, she is rivaled only by Margaret Thatcher. 

Dennis Prager denies we were founded as a nation, remains ignorant of the first line of the Declaration of Independence

Where else? In National Review here:

But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

This, of course, couldn't be more wrong, the crackpot idea of libertarians everywhere, not the least of which has been Charles Murray ("four million people founded a new nation from scratch"), offended as they are by the Declaration's opening separate but equal clause:

When . . . it becomes necessary for one people . . . to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them . . ..

Separate. Equal. Under God. America.

German leftist critic of Trump's America First policy proclaimed the death of rapacious English and American free markets in 2008

Boltneck shakes hands mit Steinmeier in 2014

It took less than one day after Trump's speech for Germany to wet its pants. First VW kills profits, and now Trump is going to cost Germany a fortune. Steinmeier here went on record almost immediately criticizing Trump's remarks as incoherent.

Here the leftist was prematurely celebrating eight years ago about the death of right-wing economics in the West:

[T]he Social Democrats (SPD) are shifting hard Left to protect their flank. "The rule of the radical market ideology that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan has ended with a loud bang," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor next year. "We need a comprehensive new start, so we can reestablish our society on fresh foundations. People create value, not locusts," he said.

John O'Sullivan: Rubio is the poster boy for the liberal immigration policies which Trump launched his campaign to oppose

Green card holder John O'Sullivan at National Review prefers Trump to the ever mendacious Marco Rubio, here:

[N]one of the three leading Republicans have been exactly models of truth-telling in this campaign. So the relevant question then becomes “Compared with whom?” Let’s compare Trump’s boastful and evasive untruths with the very different lies of Marco Rubio on various immigration bills he has tried to sell to conservatives (as detailed by John Fonte on NRO on Wednesday.) These amounted to a long campaign of deliberate mendacity intended to deceive allies on a matter of the greatest public interest so that they would unknowingly support what they really oppose.

O'Sullivan correctly acknowledges that Trump's is a non-ideological conservatism which is widely shared among Americans:

Conservatives in practice accept that their realism about human nature shouldn’t (or can’t) stop at the door of the voting booth. What there is of Trump’s conservatism seems to be of that kind. And that seems also to be true of “ordinary” conservatives outside Washington, as several writers such as Rod Dreher have pointed out. They tend not to have highly consistent ideologies but to tolerate contradictions within a broadly conservative outlook. One very likely effect of a GOP conservatism influenced by Trumpery, therefore, is that it will remain conservative but in a less consistently ideological way. It is likely to be more spasmodically interventionist in economic policy, more concerned with directly protecting the interests of Americans (and especially the voting groups who have surged up to back Trump), more anxious about how to solve the problems identified by Charles Murray in Fishtown without spending too much more on them, more protective of entitlements, and more loudly patriotic in general. As a fully paid-up Thatcherite, I will find a lot of this irksome and mistaken. It will remind me of the pre-Thatcher Tory party and its bumbling resistance to economic rationality. And I’m beginning to feel grouchily that I want to hear a little less about American exceptionalism until the U.S. manages not to lose a war. 

Margaret Thatcher's Last Words

(here)

Margaret Thatcher Was No Libertarian, Moving Leftward To Adapt Like Sen. Rand Paul

Marco Rubio, are you listening?

Ben Domenech, here:

Thatcher was originally seen as a Heath acolyte within the Tory wing, given a cabinet position in Education – but the distance between them grew, and she became closer to fellow Cabinet member Keith Joseph, forming a tiny band of back benchers disagreeing with the aims of the party leadership. ...

Heath’s approach failed at the ballot box. After losing the election in 1974 and failing to form a coalition government with the Liberal Party (a No Labels-esque Government of National Unity), he took it as a sign that the Tories had to move leftward in order to adapt to the opinions of the nation. Thatcher disagreed, and that made all the difference. When Joseph announced that he would challenge Heath for party leadership, Thatcher was the only Cabinet member to endorse him; when Joseph was forced to withdraw (thanks to demography comments implying the working class really ought to consider using birth control more regularly – the speech is here), he was forced to withdraw. So Thatcher insisted she would run. ...

The dominant assumption was that [Thatcher] would have to moderate to become acceptable to the British people. She did not. Instead, she repackaged conservative principles with a message of common sense and optimism, attacking nonsensical regulation, union dominance, and high taxes with verve. She promised hope and growth, not dour austerity, and insisted that acceptance of a nation in decline was a choice, not an inevitability.

Thatcher: "Socialist governments ... always run out of other people's money."

Llew Gardner:

There are those nasty critics, of course, who suggest that you don't really want to bring them down at the moment. Life is a bit too difficult in the country, and that … leave them to sort the mess out and then come in with the attack later … say next year.

Mrs. Margaret Thatcher:

I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. Look at the trouble now we're having with choice of schools. Of course parents want a say in the kind of education their children have. Look at the William Tyndall School—an example where the parents finally rebelled. Of course they did. These schools are financed by taxpayers' money, but the choice to parents is being reduced.

Look at the large numbers of people who live on council estates. Many of them would like to buy their own homes. Oh, but that's not approved of by a Socialist government …   . oh no! But that's absurd. Why shouldn't they? Well over thirty per cent of our houses are council houses. Why shouldn't those people purchase their own homes if they can?

-- February 5, 1976, Thames TV interview, here

Thatcher's Finest Hour: And So Say All Of Us

"She always afterwards regarded the Falklands War as the most important period of her premiership."

-- The UK Telegraph, here

"The Prophet Without Honor In Her Own Country": Thatcher Dead at 87

both free at last

'The second negative [which helped end her prime ministership] was [Mrs. Thatcher's] intransigent attitude to further European integration; this put her in a minority in her own party. But re-reading her strident speeches today gives no sense of them being out-of-date or belonging to a by-gone era. She dismissed the idea of a United States of Europe as a fantasy. I believed in it at the time, but now I see that she was correct. She thought that the European Union should be simply a free trade area with limited co-operation between sovereign nations. That is what an increasing number of us who were once fervent Europeans would like to get back to. As she said in a famous speech in Bruges that was widely criticised: “Working closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy… 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 super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

'... [I]n light of the perpetual crisis in which members of the Eurozone have found themselves since the onset of the financial banking crisis in 2007 as a result of misjudged integration, those negative judgments now appear wrong. In this respect at least, she was an example of the prophet without honour in her own country.'

-- Andreas Whittam Smith in The UK Independent, here

President-Elect Hollande Of France Must Be Reading Clive Crook

Here's Clive just days ago:

The question is whether Hollande will row back from his campaign pledges quickly enough to avert disaster.

The mood of jubilation among France’s unreconstructed leftists will make it difficult. And Hollande doesn’t have much time. Mitterrand took from 1981 to 1983 to discover that his policies constituted the alternative that Margaret Thatcher had in mind when she said, “There is no alternative.” Hollande may have just days to come to the same revelation. Looming parliamentary elections complicate the tactical judgment. Hollande needs voters to give him the majority in next month’s vote for the legislature. He can’t betray his supporters before then.

Whether it’s sooner or later, Hollande will be forced to acknowledge reality, and the disillusionment of the French left will be terrible.

But if it’s sooner, some good could come of his election. ...

Wisely, Hollande’s campaign was more about posture than specifics. We know he’s against austerity and for taxing the rich -- but he hasn’t drawn up a budget. That must wait, he says, until auditors have checked the government’s books. This could give the new president cover to rethink his position on longer-term fiscal control and structural reform. If he does that and insists on short-term fiscal moderation, whether this is deemed a renegotiation of the fiscal pact or merely a supplement to it, his election might help Europe.

And now we have President-elect Hollande today here, taking cover and preparing his supporters for the bad news:

Hollande stuck to his own deficit reduction goals despite new European Union figures released Friday that paint a bleak picture for France and the whole eurozone.

"I have known for several weeks that there was a greater degradation than the outgoing government said there was. We conclude that this is a confirmation," Hollande told reporters in the central city of Tulle.

He said the new figures do not necessarily mean he has less room to maneuver after he takes office Tuesday. "No, we had already expected this," he said in remarks shown on French television.

He said he's asked for an audit of France's budget by the Cour des Comptes, budget watchdog. The audit is expected to be completed by late June.

Current Federal Spending Implies a Head Tax of $12,338 on Every Man, Woman, Child

$3.8 trillion in spending divided by population of 308 million equals $12,338 per person this fiscal year, including every baby and everyone in a nursing home.

It would probably be as popular as was Margaret Thatcher's Community Charge.

But it might drive out the illegals.

Which Republican Woman is Desperate, Ambitious and Egotistical?

Sarah Palin, right?

No, that's The Ace of Spades on Michele Bachmann, crying "Bullshit!" on her anti-vaccination critique of Gov. Rick Perry, here:

Michelle Bachmann is desperate. She's an ambitious, egotistical woman who started running for President just two short years after she first ran for Congress. In the past two months her support went from 13% and rising to 4% and falling.

That's funny, Sarah Palin keeps launching salvos in the direction of the declared Republican candidates but keeps playing coy about her own candidacy, imagined she could resign her governorship and remain credible with the Republican rank and file, and plays the kingmaker in races all over the country on the basis of the thinnest of records of public service all the while touting that record as twenty years in public life, mutilating sweet reason all along the way.

Sounds pretty egotistical, ambitious and desperate to me.

The Republican Party still doesn't have its Margaret Thatcher. More like a pair of Molly Hatchets.

Sarah Palin Joins Michele Bachmann in Proving They're No Historians

Sarah Palin evidently insists Paul Revere's ride was meant also to warn . . . the British!

As reported here, along with supporters' shenanigans at Wikipedia.

For the Michele Bachmann flub, see here.

If we have to have a woman for president, why can't we have one more like Margaret Thatcher? Oxford graduate in chemistry, 1947.