Democrats block Senate Resolution to pay homage to Margaret Thatcher

[txradioguy]

In the words of the immortal Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

Lanie, it's not all about you and why we should get all excited trying to make you agree with conservatives. It's a moot point.

Lady Thatcher has always been one of my heroes. She was a great, courageous woman who spoke her mind and stood up for what she thought was right. You don't see much of that around today.

She was a great supporter of Reagan and under her, the UK was a staunch ally of the United States.

I personally don't get all wrapped up in wanting liberals to agree with me. Everyone has their right to their opinion.

And I don't like grave dancers on either side of the aisle.

QFT

[txradioguy]

And for those of you who think Pinochet only murdered and disappeared extreme Marxists, you're wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...t/overview.htm



It's funny. During the 2012 election, a big deal was made about the supposed persecution of Catholics over the birth control issue. All the while, this guy murdered Catholics. But that's no big deal because he was a righty, right? He killed people in the rural community for being part of unions. Nobody deserves to die or to be arrested for this stuff.

I've said what I had to say.

Just can't ever admit you're wrong can you?

[Lanie]

Just can't ever admit you're wrong can you?

I thought about apologizing last night because I know how much Thatcher means to people. Saying I think I'm wrong about Thatcher and that you all are right would be lying though. And isn't that what you accuse me of all the time? Lying. You want me to "tell the truth" and admit I'm a moonbat. Well, here you go. This is how I honestly think/feel about this subject.

I'm sorry that I've offended you all with my words. I am sorry for those grieving her death including her family.

[Odysseus]

Pinochet murdered people for being the opposition. That's not a lie. Nothing Allende or another leader did justifies that.

You all make excuses for these human rights violations with what? Stalin did it. Nobody here is disagreeing that Stalin was a monster, so that's why I'm not complaining about him. But people are making excuses for Pinochet. There was no excuse in what he did.

How can you expect me to believe your side is for freedom, when people defend stuff like this? How can you expect me to believe you're for free speech when you try to use the tactic of "Convert or you're a liar?" No, I'm not playing that game.

Lanie, he was fighting a civil war. Before Allende was deposed, he had been cited unanimously by the Chilean Supreme Court for taking unconstitutional measures, and impeached by the legislature. Allende's response was to foment a civil war. Here's Wikipedia's summary:

Supreme Court's resolution On 26 May 1973, Chile’s Supreme Court unanimously denounced the Allende régime’s disruption of the legality of the nation in its failure to uphold judicial decisions. It refused to permit police execution of judicial resolutions that contradicted the Government's measures.
[edit] Chamber of Deputies' resolution

On 22 August 1973, with the support of the Christian Democrats and National Party members, the Chamber of Deputies passed 81–47 a resolution that asked "the President of the Republic, Ministers of State, and members of the Armed and Police Forces"^[19] to "put an immediate end" to "breach[es of] the Constitution . . . with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of Law and ensuring the Constitutional order of our Nation, and the essential underpinnings of democratic co-existence among Chileans."

The resolution declared that the Allende Government sought ". . . to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the State . . . [with] the goal of establishing a totalitarian system", claiming it had made "violations of the Constitution . . . a permanent system of conduct." Essentially, most of the accusations were about the Socialist Government disregarding the separation of powers, and arrogating legislative and judicial prerogatives to the executive branch of government.
Specifically, the Socialist Government of President Allende was accused of:

• ruling by decree, thwarting the normal legislative system
• refusing to enforce judicial decisions against its partisans; not carrying out sentences and judicial resolutions that contravene its objectives
• ignoring the decrees of the independent General Comptroller's Office
• sundry media offences; usurping control of the National Television Network and applying ... economic pressure against those media organizations that are not unconditional supporters of the government...
• allowing its socialist supporters to assemble armed, preventing the same by its right wing opponents
• . . . supporting more than 1,500 illegal ‘takings’ of farms...
• illegal repression of the El Teniente miners’ strike
• illegally limiting emigration

Finally, the resolution condemned the creation and development of government-protected [socialist] armed groups, which . . . are headed towards a confrontation with the armed forces. President Allende's efforts to re-organize the military and the police forces were characterised as notorious attempts to use the armed and police forces for partisan ends, destroy their institutional hierarchy, and politically infiltrate their ranks.
It can be argued that the resolution called upon the armed forces to overthrow Allende if he did not reform, as follows "...To present the President of the Republic, Ministers of State, and members of the Armed and Police Forces with the grave breakdown of the legal and constitutional order ... it is their duty to put an immediate end to all situations herein referred to that breach the Constitution and the laws of the land with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of Law " ^[20]
[edit] President Allende's response

Two days later, on 24 August 1973, President Allende responded,^[21] characterising the Congress's declaration as destined to damage the country’s prestige abroad and create internal confusion, predicting It will facilitate the seditious intention of certain sectors. He noted that the declaration had not obtained the two-thirds Senate majority constitutionally required to convict the president of abuse of power: essentially, the Congress were invoking the intervention of the armed forces and of Order against a democratically elected government and subordinat[ing] political representation of national sovereignty to the armed institutions, which neither can nor ought to assume either political functions or the representation of the popular will.

Allende argued he had obeyed constitutional means for including military men to the cabinet at the service of civic peace and national security, defending republican institutions against insurrection and terrorism. In contrast, he said that Congress was promoting a coup d’état or a civil war with a declaration full of affirmations that had already been refuted before-hand and which, in substance and process (directly handing it to the ministers rather than directly handing it to the President) violated a dozen articles of the (then-current) Constitution. He further argued that the legislature was usurping the government's executive function.

President Allende wrote: Chilean democracy is a conquest by all of the people. It is neither the work nor the gift of the exploiting classes, and it will be defended by those who, with sacrifices accumulated over generations, have imposed it . . . With a tranquil conscience . . . I sustain that never before has Chile had a more democratic government than that over which I have the honor to preside . . . I solemnly reiterate my decision to develop democracy and a state of law to their ultimate consequences . . . Parliament has made itself a bastion against the transformations . . . and has done everything it can to perturb the functioning of the finances and of the institutions, sterilizing all creative initiatives.

Adding that economic and political means would be needed to relieve the country's current crisis, and that the Congress were obstructing said means; having already paralyzed the State, they sought to destroy it. He concluded by calling upon the workers, all democrats and patriots to join him in defending the Chilean Constitution and the revolutionary process.

Given that he had armed organized his own paramilitary forces, this was a call to violent reprisals against the opposition, which were implemented. The Chilean Army opposed this coup, and acted against Allende. When Allende was deposed, the Chilean left began a terror campaign. From Wikipedia:

After the coup, left-wing organizations tried to set up resistance groups against the regime. Many activists created groups of resistance from refugees abroad, while the Communist Party of Chile set up an armed wing, which became in 1983 the FPMR (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez). In the first three months of military rule, the Chilean forces recorded 162 military deaths.^[66] A total of 756 servicemen and police are reported to have been killed or wounded in guerrilla incidents.^[75] The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR) founded at the University of Concepción suffered heavy casualties in the coup's immediate aftermath, and most of its members fled the country.^[76]

The insurgency against the government precipitated the repressions against the terrorists and their supporters. This is something that the left invariably leaves out of its outraged recollections of Pinochet. They also forget that Pinochet stepped down voluntarily and submitted to free elections, something that only one communist government has ever done (and the Sandinistas were forced to concede only because the sheer volume of their loss could not be hidden from the international observers and the Bush administration would not permit them to ignore the results).

But, this isn't about Pinochet, this is about Thatcher. The left doesn't hate her because she had something nice to say about a dictator (they've never objected to dictators, as long as they were leftist dictators), they hate her because she proved them wrong. Britain was presumed to be in a permanent state of collapse, and Thatcher reversed that. She brought the unions, which had paralyzed the country with strikes, back under the rule of law (which is why the unions loathed her). My wife's description of the "Winter of Discontent" prior to Thatcher's election was that they were constantly short of critical staples due to strikes. She remembers having to read by candlelight because the coal miners had brought electricity generation to a halt. The late 70s rivaled the Blitz for austerity, but unlike the Blitz, the 70s austerity was imposed from within. Thatcher ended that by applying the law, which the unions had flouted, and by privatizing industries that had been failing for decades. You claim that she was not a supporter of the working class, but it was Thatcher whose privatization of public housing turned the majority of Britons into home-owners. It was also Thatcher who unequivocably supported the US in the Cold War, allowing the deployment of Pershing II missiles to Britain, despite the efforts of the Soviet-backed Nuclear Freeze Movement. When the Berlin Wall came down, the left blamed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for the end of their party. That's why they are grave-dancing.

[txradioguy]

But, this isn't about Pinochet, this is about Thatcher. The left doesn't hate her because she had something nice to say about a dictator (they've never objected to dictators, as long as they were leftist dictators), they hate her because she proved them wrong. Britain was presumed to be in a permanent state of collapse, and Thatcher reversed that. She brought the unions, which had paralyzed the country with strikes, back under the rule of law (which is why the unions loathed her). My wife's description of the "Winter of Discontent" prior to Thatcher's election was that they were constantly short of critical staples due to strikes. She remembers having to read by candlelight because the coal miners had brought electricity generation to a halt. The late 70s rivaled the Blitz for austerity, but unlike the Blitz, the 70s austerity was imposed from within. Thatcher ended that by applying the law, which the unions had flouted, and by privatizing industries that had been failing for decades. You claim that she was not a supporter of the working class, but it was Thatcher whose privatization of public housing turned the majority of Britons into home-owners. It was also Thatcher who unequivocably supported the US in the Cold War, allowing the deployment of Pershing II missiles to Britain, despite the efforts of the Soviet-backed Nuclear Freeze Movement. When the Berlin Wall came down, the left blamed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for the end of their party. That's why they are grave-dancing.

QFT.

[DumbAss Tanker]

President Allende wrote:. . . Parliament has made itself a bastion against the transformations . . . and has done everything it can to perturb the functioning of the finances and of the institutions, sterilizing all creative initiatives.

That part was a particular laugher, Allende had, if I recall correctly, virtually destroyed the resource-rich Chilean economy through typically-effective attempts at central planning and hyper-inflation, to the extent that most of the country was more relieved than outraged when he was shot and the bullshit was finally over.

Originally Posted by Lanie
...How can you expect me to believe your side is for freedom, when people defend stuff like this? How can you expect me to believe you're for free speech when you try to use the tactic of "Convert or you're a liar?" No, I'm not playing that game.

Also a laugher. This is an internet forum, not a religious mission to rescue benighted idiots. If you are convinced in your emo little heart that 2 + 2 = Potato, it's a waste of time for anyone to try to introduce you to the concept of "4," and we're not here because it's about you.

[Odysseus]

That part was a particular laugher, Allende had, if I recall correctly, virtually destroyed the resource-rich Chilean economy through typically-effective attempts at central planning and hyper-inflation, to the extent that most of the country was more relieved than outraged when he was shot and the bullshit was finally over.

Not so much virtually as literally. By 1972, the Chilean economy was suffering from inflation rates of 140% with Real GDP contracting between at an annual rate of 5.6% ("negative growth"). The government's deficit soared against declining foreign reserves. Basic food staples disappeared from supermarkets and black marketeering was rampant. Exports fell 24% and imports rose 26%, with imports of food rising an estimated 149%. And people wonder why Allende was ousted.

Also a laugher. This is an internet forum, not a religious mission to rescue benighted idiots. If you are convinced in your emo little heart that 2 + 2 = Potato, it's a waste of time for anyone to try to introduce you to the concept of "4," and we're not here because it's about you.

The point of the OP is that leftists are using any excuse to deny Margaret Thatcher a tribute. Lanie has brought up Pinochet, and forced us onto a tangent, but as previously stated, Pinochet is irrelevent. If Thatcher had denounced him, the left would still loathe her for proving them wrong. Thatcher was so effective at destroying the British left that the only way that they were able to regain power was to rename their party (remember "New Labour"?) and pretend to purge the loons.

[Adam Wood]

That part was a particular laugher, Allende had, if I recall correctly, virtually destroyed the resource-rich Chilean economy through typically-effective attempts at central planning and hyper-inflation, to the extent that most of the country was more relieved than outraged when he was shot and the bullshit was finally over.

FWIW, the official story is still that he offed himself. They dug his sorry ass up a few years ago and did another autopsy, and found that the forensics were consistent with the story at the time: the guy put an AK-47 (a personal gift from Fidel Castro) under his chin, set at full-auto, and pulled the trigger, which released two rounds into and through the top of his head.

[JB]

Barry didn't send anyone from his administration to her funeral. Just found this out. What a scumbag he is.

No VP, Sec of State, no one. He flies his kids all over the country on our dime but he can't spare someone from his administration a few hours to represent the US at her funeral? Again, scumbag.

Maybe he'll send her family DVDs of his speeches. With any luck they will be out of region too. Scumbag.

[RobJohnson]

Barry didn't send anyone from his administration to her funeral. Just found this out. What a scumbag he is.

No VP, Sec of State, no one. He flies his kids all over the country on our dime but he can't spare someone from his administration a few hours to represent the US at her funeral? Again, scumbag.

Maybe he'll send her family DVDs of his speeches. With any luck they will be out of region too. Scumbag.

If George Soros would of really died, Obama would of been there.