There's word rumbling around Great Britain and beyond that Sarah Palin is angling to meet Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to become that nation's prime minister.
It's a photo op that would be a triumph for Palin: an image supposedly showing the solidarity of conservative female leaders.
But it would be bogus. Not photoshopped-bogus, but dishonest nonetheless.
Baroness Thatcher is suffering from dementia, according to her daughter, Carol. Writing in the Daily Mail more than a year and a half ago, Carol Thatcher chronicled her mother's decline: "On bad days, she could hardly remember the beginning of a sentence by the time she got to the end.''
For a woman of Thatcher's formidable intellect and unflagging energy, it's a terrible decline. For Palin's camp to use her as a human prop, as in a photo op, it's unforgivable.
For one thing, Thatcher was never about female solidarity. For another, she did not suffer fools gladly; her exacting impatience with anyone not up to snuff was legendary. And what the woman who fought to become prime minister and fought harder to stay there might have said of a governor who walked away from her elected office can be vividly and acidly imagined.
Read the rest of my post here.
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"Sarah Palin should not assume that, after jetting over to London, she’ll be able to swan in through Margaret Thatcher’s front door, pose for snaps round the hearth, add it to her presidential campaign portfolio and hop off back to Alaska.
Lady T is picky about who she is seen with.
‘We would prefer a discreet meeting in the margins, perhaps at a dinner where they chance to meet, so to speak,’ said
a friend of Maggie.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1288051/BLACK-DOG-Dont-mess-Maggie-Palin-told.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0rPHVgZa9" (hat tip Gryphen).
Having said that, on Maggie Thatcher's worse day in her present diminished state, she is still an intellectual mountain compared to Palin's molehill of a brain.
Why not let Sarah stand by cardboard cut-outs of the Queen, Lady Thatcher...even Fergie! She'd be able to convince her rabid supporters that they were "real" people.
A.m.e.n!
All she wants is a photo for her face-book. Maybe she can go to the Wax Museum. That Might work.
At this point, Sarah's complete inappropriateness and tawdry use of anyone and anything to get what she wants (chief among them some bogus bonafides) should come as no surprise. This is a woman after all who has used to a Down Syndrome child, dragging him pillar to post, with a callousness that is breathtaking. But this proposed use of Margaret Thatcher is just too...vile.
I hope they put a stop to this. At some point somebody has got to throw a cog in the wheels of this charlatan's endless quest for an importance she is so unworthy of. Enough already.
Thank you for an excellent article. You summed it up so well.