Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est la Meme Chose

If the world can tolerate one last post about the former PM of Great Britain Margaret Thatcher, I have one last thought.

I've written here and here about how and presumably why (in my view) the Left hated and continue to hate Mrs Thatcher, even in death.

Yesterday, Americans suffered another terrible terrorist bombing - this time in Boston.  As the annual Boston Marathon was coming to a completion, two bombs exploded at the race's finish line.  Thus far, three have been killed - one an eight year old boy who had gone to cheer on his father, and was, according to reports, at the exact scene because the father had just completed the race, and the little boy - Martin Richard was name - had run out to hug his father.  The boy's mother underwent emergency brain surgery to save her life, though the final outcome is not as of right now; known.  This story is here.  More than 140 others are injured, some gravely.

There are many reasons given for the hatred of Mrs Thatcher, some perhaps more valid than others.

One often-given reason was the former PM's refusal to re-classify IRA terrorists as "political" prisoners.  Recall that, from the late 1960s through the 1998 Belfast "Good Friday" accords of 1998. (Note: some of the so-called "Real" IRA still refuse to acknowledge the truce, and violence will crop up from time to time).  Several IRA members, in the infamous Maze Prison for various crimes, took to hunger striking in an attempt to have their status as common criminals changed - ironically, a status that they had enjoyed in the early 1970s under a previous Conservative government, and one which was removed under Thatcher's predecessor, James Callaghan.

Mrs Thatcher refused to be cowed at the time under intense pressure - much of it from places like Boston as the fates would have it.  She was having none of it.  Many Americans would have us believe that the IRA were more than just common, bomb-throwing gangsters.

Thus far, there is no official word as to just who planted the bombs in Boston; why really doesn't much matter in my view, and and to even ask seems as a sort of cruel madness in the light of an eight year old who has lost his life as he hugged his father, for some imagined "cause."

What Mrs Thatcher did, in effect, was to tell the IRA and by extension, its supporters, that planting bombs that certainly will kill innocent people - as the IRA did with some regularity, including a bomb planted in Harrod's Department Store the week before Christmas in 1983- is not a political act.