Wall Street Journal Saturday, December 9, 2006
Her blunt style and strong defense of liberty will be missed.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, who died yesterday at 80, was that rare thing–a public intellectual and a public figure. She excelled at both.
Ms. Kirkpatrick is known to the public at large because Ronald Reagan, after defeating Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980, appointed her U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. It is worth mentioning in this context that earlier this week Senate Democrats succeeded finally in driving John Bolton from the U.N. ambassadorship. The mind’s eye recalls the televised image in the early 1980s of Ambassador Kirkpatrick, a Democrat then, seated at the U.N. Security Council table and publicly defending U.S. interests against the Soviet Union with an articulate, no-nonsense bluntness that makes Mr. Bolton sound like Little Bo-Peep by comparison. That style–American interests made perfectly clear–will be missed.
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It’s too bad the right wing doesn’t read it’s own literature. In November 1979 Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote a piece in Commentary magazine in opposition to the U.S. undermining non-communist, authoritarian regimes. Although it was written in 1979, much of it could have applied to Iraq of 2003:
You can read the original article here:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=6189&page=all