Do you seriously believe this stupid argument, or are you just trolling? Using the same criteria, the GOP leadership should have been comparably treated for refusing to support the Kosovo war.
They consciously and purposely acted to aid our enemies in Kosovo? Learn something everyday.
Depends how you define “aid,” doesn’t it? I imagine the speaker of the goddamn house refusing to support the president’s war would have a lot bigger effect than Jane Fonda cavorting with a AA gun.
If you’re going to use that definition, stick to it.
Imagine that we were losing 50,000 people in a war in the Middle East today. That they were holding and torturing large numbers of Americans. Dragging dead Americans through the streets. And Tom Cruise went over, paraded around with the enemy military leaders, sat smiling at an AAA battery aiming at American aircraft, had strings of tortured American POWs, many of whom have families that don’t even know whether there loved ones are dead or in prison camps, put on show in front of him, many of who were beaten to get them to particpate, while Cruise called them liars and anyone who claimed the prisoners were being mistreated liars. Then imagine Cruise going on all the news stations from the enemy side calling all of soldiers very derogatory names, slandering them, saying that the enemy was being wronged by the U.S.
Who do you think would have more impact in the news? A politician playing politics? Or Tom Cruise? Who do you think would be shown around the world?
I’m really baffled at why you think poor Jane was victimized here. Nixon really didn’t have an impact on the perception of Fonda that people who hated and resented what she did had of her. Really. All she had to do was say what she said and do what she did. Every community had sons and fathers who were killed, missing, wounded, in action. Every community, town, city had families whose loved ones were over there. Fonda didn’t need any help beyond her own words and actions to get a lot of people actively disliking her. Like I said, we live in an amazing country where someone can stand with inhumane, torturing prison guards while rows of your country’s imprisoned citizens are paraded in front of you like circus animals, some of whom would not survive what these people were putting them through and all of them going through more pain and torture than you or I could endure, that person put them down, call them liars, etc. and that person have absolutely no action taken against them by their country.
Squirrel, it’s not my definition. As written, Tom Delay talking shit about Kosovo and trying to cut funding cut off would be “consciously aiding the enemy,” right?
Jeff, Cruise would get more news coverage, but he wouldn’t have more impact. He doesn’t control the house budget, to push the Delay thing.
I’m not arguing with “boy she was insanely counterproductive and mean,” I don’t think she was “victimized” - I linked to an article indicating that her and Dr. Spock were picked out by Nixon as a place to focus american ire about the war as a distraction.
…and that person have absolutely no action taken against them by their country.
…other than the President putting together an organized campaign to go after them, which was my point.
At the time world opinion and pressure had more impact than any funding issues. As for the impact of whatever Nixon wanted to do to Fonda, by the time Nixon was in place, American ire could not be distracted by anything he could drum up on Fonda, Spock, or Walter Cronkite. Spock was an outspoken anti-war protester, but neither he nor Fonda were hurt by anything that Nixon tried to do. Hell, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers were probably more hurt by Clinton’s folks than Fonda or Spock were by Nixon. It wasn’t like Fonda was trying to do her thing in private and Nixon exposed it: she was courting the cameras and microphones from the entire world press. Spock? Hell, my conservative, Air Force dad knew he was an anti-war protester, but he still gave me and my wife Spock’s book when we were pregnant with our first kid, so that was a pretty ineffective campaign too.
So, no, nothing that Fonda did over there resulted in any punishment of any type. Other than Tricky Dick telling people to dig up the dirt on her and see if they could smear her. Which was unneccesary and didn’t have any additional impact.
But to end on a common point: yes, Nixon was an evil conniving bastard who should have ended up in prison.
Jeff, do you think without Nixon she would have ended up as a central figure of hate, with endless urban legends of betrayal assigned to her?
Jane Fonda needs no urban legends. What she actually did – pose with North Vietnamese soldiers who were shooting our men – is bad enough.
Are any of you familiar with Aesop’s fable of the bugler? He is captured by enemies, and they are going to kill him. He pleads with them that he doesn’t kill anyone, and never would hurt anyone – he just plays the call to charge, the call to retreat, the call to battle… “That is why you must die,” they tell him. “You give others the courage to fight.”
What she did alone is enough. Even if you were to disprove every other tale about her, and show how intelligent and proud she was, you would not be able to work your way around that. And as a result, this article, though full of the urban legends surrounding her, does not bother to mention this one thing that she actually did do. It’s as if by pretending it never happened, by not mentioning it, those of us who DO remember would somehow forget about it.
No, we haven’t forgotten. And we’re not going to.
Absolutely. The extremely widely publicised North Vietnam tour/event/comments alone are what demonized her with the Vets and those with family and friends serving (and killed, MIA, POW, etc.) That wasn’t a Nixon orchestrated event, it was a Jane Fonda/world press event. Had she only made the speeches that Spock and so many others did, she’d have just been another liberal Hollywood anti-war person, of which there were an abundance. Nothing Nixon did had any impact at all above her infamous trip and in particular the humiliation of the POWs and her comments and quite frankly the infamous photo of her grinning as she manned the gun surrounded by the enemy. Listen: I’m one of the ones for whom that demonized her. I remember that era extremely well, I missed the draft by a very short period of time. Good friends of my family, fathers of my good friends, were shot down and killed at exactly the time she was doing all of that. We have a couple of very good family friends, pilots, who were MIA and their families still agonize over what happened to them. Four good family friends who were POWs and who were tortured endlessly for years: one died of the torture, one came home with only a disabled arm, one came home blind in one eye from being tortured with a hot sharp stick, as well as being crippled. People we knew but who weren’t friends so to speak were dragged through the streets and then killed and gutted. The other was tortured for 4 years but survived with no real permanent physical issues. The kid who was my best friend’s older brother, who coached my YMCA football team, was killed after 3 months over there. My father was in Vietnam, at Da Nang, at the exact time that Fonda was standing with the prison guards denouncing the American prisoners being paraded in front of her and calling them names and declaring how humane and great the North Vietnamese were and how evil our soldiers were. Do you really think that I needed Nixon to do anything at all to form my impression of her after watching her over there, in the midst of what was going on? Or that any vet needed anything beyond what she did in North Vietnam as the honored guest of the enemy?
Ok, Jeff, I guess that makes sense then.
I still think it’s ridiculous to focus 1/1000th of your ire on some noisy, powerless celebrity, though. It’s mistaking hindbrain outrage for justice.
She wasn’t powerless. She had a significant and tangible impact on the morale of the North Vietnamese troops in the form of American troop deaths.
And if that doesn’t get your dander up, I don’t know what will.
It’s purely an emotive thing. I think that it would be hard to fully appreciate unless you lived through that era.
FWIW, I was once a big defender/supporter of the Vietnam War as something that was right to do but done poorly. While I do think that the North Vietnamese running things back then were pretty evil people, I now have a pretty strong simmering anger at the politicians that got us into that conflict and escalated it, butressed by lies and deception. The Gulf of Tonkin was our WMDs.
Oh this had nothing to do with Fonda and everything to do with your seemingly endless jihad against a dead man’s already disgraced legacy.And by God I’ll hear you say it.
Seriously, Jason, we get it. Nixon was bad. NEXT ISSUE.
Not your definition of “treason,” but your overbroad definition of “aid” that equates “dissent” with everything that Jeff mentioned. If you’re going to use that definition, stick to it.
Larry, I posted the link for the Iraq angle/demonizing dissent thing (which I guess we didn’t get around to), not to kick Nixon’s corpse again.
Interesting discussion over at crooked timber elaborating more:
Jason- That wasn’t interesting, unless you find logic-ignoring prattle like:
Lembcke does indeed write about awful treatment that returning Vietnam veterans received—from World War II veterans who thought they were punks who’d lost “their” war. The antiwar movement treated Vietnam veterans much better. The need to stigmatize the anti-warriors is a psychological strategy of innocence for all kinds of unsavory stuff. That’s the point.
Sebastian, riddle me this: why is what we remember about Fonda’s North Vietnam trip is the anti-aircraft photo, and not the fact that, after she produced filmed evidence we had begun bombing dikes in a campaign that could have killed hundreds of thousands of people (Nixon is on tape saying we should nuke them), the administration (a) stopped denying it wasn’t bombing dikes; and (b) stopped bombing the dikes?
Consider, also, this: Fonda was wildly insensitive to call POWs liars. Be that as it may, we must be grownups and acknowledge that some of them were, in fact, liars
Interesting. Perhaps there’s some interesting sociology about group identification or something there. But mostly what you’ll take away from that link is that rick perlstein is a pretty dishonest individual.
Note I didn’t say whether I agreed with it not. The comments get more interesting as it goes.