Senate Democrats Refusing to Note Thatcher's Record

The funeral for former British PM Margaret Thatcher is tomorrow. The Senate is working on a resolution honoring her, but talks have broken down because the version championed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) actually notes some of the things that Thatcher did while in office.

According to Democratic aides, the two senators were working together on language late last week, when Menendez made suggestions about a proposal from McConnell. These aides say Menendez was looking to remove language that could have been seen as “swipes” against other countries, and proposed those changes to McConnell.

A Republican aide said Menendez appeared to be trying to whittle down the resolution to “name, rank, serial number” — in other words, a bare-bones description of Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister. A GOP aide said that among other things, Menendez was looking to eliminate references to the Falkland Islands dispute, and her support for the U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe.

Winning the Falklands war and the Cold War are two of Thatcher’s major trio of achievements. The third is her privatization of the then moribund British economy. A resolution that fails to acknowledge any of those achievements is like a book about Shakespeare that leaves out Romeo and Juliet. It’s laughably incomplete.

Democrats seem to have come to terms with the Soviets losing the Cold War. They haven’t come to terms with the Western leaders who made that happen, or the the fact that they were wrong about the tactics it took to win. They’re trying to put all that down the memory hole.