One came from privilege, was a Goldwater girl, and married a man who would become president of the United States. The other was the daughter of a greengrocer, who attended University of Oxford to study Chemistry. Both were professed Methodists. Both would reach pinnacles in an otherwise man’s world. But only one broke the glass ceiling, and for that it seems Hillary Clinton is publicly snubbing former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the late Margaret Thatcher.
Hillary Clinton
Is anyone surprised? Hillary’s sorest loser pustules continue to fester with each woman who threatens to achieve what she appears to hold as her accomplishments alone. By her account, it should’ve been Mrs. Clinton to reach the ultimate bar when, in fact, Thatcher beat her to it by decades.
Perhaps that is why Thatcher didn’t make the cut in Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s latest book, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.
Harriet Tubman, Malala Yousafzai, Rachel Carson, and swimmer Diana Nyad made the Clinton grade. When queried about the reasons for the obvious cold shouldering, Clinton made her thoughts clear during an interview with the BBC:
“She doesn’t fit the other part of the definition in our opinion, which really is knocking down other barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference.”
Then she went further claiming Thatcher had to adapt and change to reach the heights she did, offering that she was quite “clever to mold herself to be more acceptable in terms of everything from hairstyle and speaking style to clothing style.”
Dismissive much?
Checklist
Taking umbrage on behalf of his former boss, Nile Gardiner, a former aide and current director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center, was astonished – and seriously unhappy at the rebuke offered by Madam Clinton. As he pointed out, she was a world leader. “It’s simply staggering that a book about strong women leaves out Margaret Thatcher, who undoubtedly has been the most important woman leader of modern times by a mile.”
We should compare notes. In October 1984, Thatcher dodged a terrorist attack from the Irish Republican Army at a Brighton hotel in England. A long delay bomb – the IRA digs their explosions – went off the day before a planned Conservative Party conference. Thatcher was at the hotel in preparation for the event when the blast killed five people. But Thatcher appeared on schedule the next morning to deliver a rousing speech.
Hillary Clinton claimed she landed in Bosnia under heavy sniper fire. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” Yeah, that didn’t happen as videos of the event surfaced proving that was in fact a lie.
Thatcher ruled over the Falklands War, and as Gardiner described, “She stood up to a Latin American dictator who had seized British territory and she waged a war nearly 10,000 miles across the world to make sure the British territory was liberated.”
Margaret Thatcher
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State couldn’t be bothered to answer a 3 a.m. telephone call from her ambassador in Benghazi, Libya.
Let’s face facts: Margaret Thatcher dominated in a man’s world by being elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times and serving from 1979 to 1990. And we all know how 2008 and 2016 worked out for the former United States Secretary of State.
The Iron Lady
Thatcher was not a pawn for anyone. The Soviet Union gave her a nickname that stuck in perpetuity, “the Iron Lady.” And she embraced that moniker. From living above the family grocery in Lincolnshire, to Oxford University, to Number 10 Downing Street, how did she not make the Clinton’s book?
When pressed by the BBC radio personality during the interview, Hillary doubled down on the omission: “But on the criterion we were really looking at: ‘OK what were the positive differences, the changes this person made that really opened the doors to more?’ That wasn’t really that apparent.”
The book itself pays tribute to 100 women who made the Clinton criterion – which seems to include everything, the kitchen sink, and a vast amount of notable and worthy accomplishments – just not the ultimate shattering of the glass ceiling that Margaret Thatcher smashed to smithereens. And that action by Clinton is the antithesis of a gutsy woman.
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