For the Left in America, those accomplishments included introducing disability benefits, standing up to the fascist dictatorship of General Galtieri in Argentina, being one of the first Western leaders to recognise a genuine reformist in Mikhail Gorbachev, showing what the New York Times described as "remarkable foresight on the dangers of climate change" and of course being the first woman prime minster of Britain, thereby creating a role model that American female politicians such as Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton would use to show that they could be just as tough as men. The fact that Hillary — who has publicly likened herself to Lady Thatcher — is running full throttle for the Democratic nomination has also not harmed Lady Thatcher's showing in the obituaries over here. Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton appointee to the State Department, told NBC of Thatcher that "conviction politicians last much longer in history" and quoted Bobby Kennedy's remark: "If there's no one in your way, you're not getting anywhere."

Unfortunately, when the media here want to attack a Briton like Margaret Thatcher, they tend to ask other Britons to do it. Martin Bashir kept harping on about her supposed "divisiveness" on NBC, for example, and put down her resignation entirely to the poll tax, as though her stance on the European Union had played no part at all. Meanwhile, A.C. Grayling began an article, "It is hard to think of a more divisive figure in British politics than Margaret Thatcher — at least since the days of the predecessor whom she most admired, the early-19th-century prime minister Lord Liverpool." Quite apart from the fact that Margaret Thatcher admired Winston Churchill, William Pitt the Younger and the Duke of Wellington far more than Liverpool, it is easy to think of plenty of British politicians more divisive than Thatcher — all one needs is some historical knowledge. David Lloyd George had to escape a lynching for his anti-war views by dressing up as a policeman during the Boer War; poets wrote about urinating on the grave of Lord Castlereagh; Winston Churchill was widely reviled among organised labour during the General Strike; Aneurin Bevan was kicked down the front steps of White's when he described Tories as "vermin".

The theme of divisiveness was picked up by National Public Radio (NPR) in its news coverage when it gravely intoned that "Margaret Thatcher divided society", and then in the very next segment, without any sense of irony, proceeded to report on President Obama's plans for the sequester, as though American politics and society isn't itself riven from top to bottom by his economic and healthcare plans. Yet it is a truth of Anglo-American politics that only right-wingers are ever attacked for the "divisiveness" of their policies. When have you ever heard Clement Attlee, for example, described as "divisive" because of his mass nationalisation of industry, extensions of the welfare state and forcing doctors and nurses to work for the state? For the Left, that's not divisiveness — though it certainly was thought so in Britain at the time — but instead it's merely considered statesmanship. 

Notoriously of the Left, NPR attacked Margaret Thatcher relentlessly on the day of her death, with journalist Stacey Vanek Smith saying: "Hating Margaret wasn't just a cultural response, it was a profitable industry". The station put out a playlist of Thatcher-hating songs by bands like The Clash, The Jam, Pink Floyd and Morrissey. "We hated that woman," they quoted some random north-easterner as saying. "We hated what she stood for — her legacy of destroying communities." After a brief report of a Falkland Islander describing Thatcher as "our Winston Churchill", NPR then reported how the Argentine press "gloated" over her death, saying that her dementia was the result of having "suffered the ravages of too many gin and tonics".