If you wonder why the Left hates America, take a look at a closely related question in Britain, as asked by journalist Simon Heffer in a column in the UK Telegraph. His question sounds different, but you will see that it's really a product of the same socialist media on both sides of the Atlantic. They both have ferocious jets of steam coming out of their ears, like ol' Yosemite Sam in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And it's for the same reason.

Heffer asks, Why does the British Left still harbor a frothing hatred for Maggie Thatcher, who is now 81 years old and very frail?  Specifically, why does the BBC still demonize Lady Thatcher every chance it gets? After all, Labour has been in power now for a dozen years, pushing as much socialism as Britain can stomach.

But there is no mercy in the Beeb's assault on Thatcher's reputation and character.

As Heffer writes:

... no day is too short, and no opportunity too tangential, to vilify Lady Thatcher....  Insults and obloquies normally cast only at the long dead, or criminals with no reputation to lose, are flung at her. Acquiescence in her demonisation has become one of the essentials of polite society.

And explains:

A long—time servant of the BBC explained to me, in a moment of stunning insight, why the Leftists in that organisation, and the Leftist contributors to it, are so bilious and angry even 16 years after Lady Thatcher left office: it is because they lost. They were wrong. They were humiliated. They have become bores with nothing else to say. They were not, of course, defeated just by Lady Thatcher: the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War defeated them, too.

Remember that Lady Thatcher is 81 and has had a series of debilitating strokes. The leftists who use 'compassion' as a political weapon have none for her.

Why in the name of all that is decent should anyone want to villify an old lady?

Americans can learn something here. We see the same thing from our leftwing media.  Why are the Democrats so "seethingly, dribblingly, incontinently, steamingly angry" ——— to use Heffer's words?  Perhaps it  has to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crumbling of the Soviet Union, and the jubilant capitalism of China and Eastern Europe. To be sure, George W. Bush is the personal incarnation of Satan, as far as the ranting Kozzacks are concerned. But Bush 42 is Reagan's heir in foreign policy and economics. Ronald Reagan was our Lady Thatcher.

The hyperventilating Left is a sight to behold. American campuses are one of the few places in the world where the names of Marx and Lenin are still pronounced with pious reverence. In reality, the intellectual initiative passed to conservatives just about the time Milton Friedman received his Nobel Prize, say, about 1976. We are just seeing the whole faith edifice of the Boomer Left as it is slowly, slowly crashing down.

Democrats once had real intellectual stars like Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They had people of shining good will, like Hubert Humphrey. They had men with spines of steel like Harry S. Truman. During the height of the Cold War,  Americans could vote for Democrats with a clear conscience, knowing they would not betray their country in a time of mortal danger.

Today the Left have Pinch Sulzberger, a tenth—rate mind at best, as America's Minister of Propaganda. They have Teddy Kennedy as their Old Bull, Robert Byrd as the living personification of the segregationist past, and a visibly drooping Hillary as their shining hope for the future.

If you had invested all your youthful energy and commitment in a God that Failed, as Arthur Koestler once called it, and suddenly the world showed you to be utterly wrong, you would have two alternatives:

change your political understanding of the world and then make the best contribution you can;

or become an enraged reactionary of the Left, clinging to an imagined future that will never  be.

What the Left owns today is a propaganda apparatus ——— the media. It controls an indoctrination apparatus ——— the campuses. But socialism lacks a credible foundation in reality, and somewhere in their secret souls, the teeth—gnashing Left knows it. Their time is gone and will not come again.