"Get a Life!"
I have said pretty much all I care to about Jane Fonda, but I had to make sure this comment got the widest publicity I can (humbly) provide.
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/04/11/jane-fonda-tells-veterans-boycotting-her-movie-butler-to-get-life/
"Get a life". Isn't that prtetty much what she said to the POWs she met in Hanoi?
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13 comments:
How about a boycott of all Hollywood movies? First of all they are too damn expensive. Second the actors, directors and producers have the morals of an alley cat. Correction an alley cat has more morals. Third, they are too liberal for us.
Let us speak loudly with our wallet.
I never go to a Fonda movie. Actually, I go to very few.
No, its not what she said to the POW's she met in Hanoi.
And I don't got to Fonda movies either, except for "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Nine to Five" which was more about Dolly Parton.
I was engaging in a rhetorical exercise, but its pretty much the same message she had for them since she was supporting their captors.
It's kind of like when a former president refused to bail out NY during their wild spending days and the news headline read, ______ to NY: "Drop dead." ( I don't remember the president.)
The president was Gerald Ford.
And Ford was right.
If Ford was right, maybe Fonda was too.
Siarlys,
Wow.
Simple logic Gary. Neither statement has anything to do with the facts. I don't even like Jane Fonda. Like I said on your last post harping on this subject, I wished she would have kept on making Barbarella movies instead of having her fling with the anti-war movement.
Look up the Doonesbury cartoon about Miss Fonda offering the domestic worker cleaning the building where she had her production studios a complementary exercise video... now that was a hard-hitting bit of humor.
There was always something about Siarlys that bothered me a little bit. I was aware that he is at least a slight radical, but I would not necessarily have thought he was/is actually a Communist sympathizer. Turns out I was wrong, in that he was a self-professed one (at least in his youth) per his posting on the Jane Fonda blurb a few days ago.
Coupled with his current post here and other writings/musings he has furnished on this and other topics, I absolutely suspect that Siarlys remains either an unreconstructed, or at the very best a semi-reconstructed, communist (and even potentially a violent jihadist) supporter/apologist in his later life.
With Siarlys, like some others (almost exclusively libs/Dems) today who continue to "oppose" the "wars" in Iraq and even Afghanistan while claiming to "support" the troops, there is a serious disconnect and a failure of logic both there and with respect to Vietnam. I simply cannot comprehend how anyone could/can simultaneously be supporters/apologists for both sides of the same issue.
Accordingly, if any of these "wars" are or were illegal/illegitimate, why then it seems to me that the Presidents (both Bush and Obama, modernly) who have prosecuted them, the members of Congress who have voted to fund them, and various Secretaries of State/Defense and other agencies, have caused military personnel from the generals/admirals down to the lowest-ranking PFC to become war criminals, as alleged by both Jane and the Right Honorable former Senator and current Secretary of State John Kerry (in Kerry's case with regard to both Vietnam and Iraq, and I believe also Afghanistan), among others.
Which means that if you consider these "wars" as illegitimate (your definition of them, not mine, and Siarlys appears to at least question their legitimacy), you are actually supporting those you have just defined as war criminals. Seems to me to be just as mutually exclusive (and illogical) as supporting both sides in a war, and I again do not believe you can have it both ways.
I obviously don't know if Siarlys was ever in the military, particularly during the Vietnam era (sounds to me like he may not have been, but I still have that trusty old crow staked out, just in case.
Obviously, there must be discipline in the military, as well as elsewhere, and troops are duty-bound to obey lawful orders. However, the UCMJ requires only that lawful orders be obeyed, and actually forbids the following of unlawful orders. An order which is unlawful not only does not need to be followed, obeying such an order can result in prosecution of the individual who obeys it. Military courts have routinely upheld this procedure.
I would be hard-pressed to say anything complimentary about Jane Fonda and would never intentionally do so, but unlike Siarlys and a fair number of others, she is at least consistent in her hatred/condemnation of these military actions as well as the troops who fight them.
There was always something about elwood that bothered me a bit... but I never would have thought he was an out and out bigot.
Calm down elwood. I've never made a secret of my history or principles. I have defined myself, currently, as politically libertarian, economically socialist, culturally conservative. I have weathered the occasional vituperative blast from those who indulge the knee-jerk reflex "You can't be all of those at once."
I did for a period of my life have hopes that communist methodology, shorn of an accretion of misguided rhetoric and precedents, could actually deliver a benign result. I came to a much healthier conclusion about why and how it wouldn't work than the mentally disturbed characters like Whittaker Chambers or pompous egoists like George Will. (Will, incidentally, is right twice a year or so).
The Lenin premise was that a tightly organized, highly disciplined party would develop professional expertise and insure fidelity to founding principles. It was meant to be a cure for the sloppy self-indulgent intellectuals who power ineffective grandstanding like the Occupy encampments, and the twice yearly protests a the IMF.
I'm all for principles like "Those who work will eat." But, watching Slobodan Milosevich turn an international socialist party into a national socialist party, at the stroke of a pen, and watching the world's largest communist party running the world's most ruthless capitalist economy definitively undermined Lenin's hopeful premise.
So, without the slightest reason to doubt the desirability of the socialist commonwealth, I could abandon communist ideology with no reservations. I do admire many of those who devoted their lives to communism, particularly those who had not the misfortune to seize state power.
As to jihadism, Lenin said "Beware a pan-Islamic movement masquerading as a national liberation front. I still think those were wise words. So does a conservative Republican-voting rabbi I'm acquainted with. (Lenin also endorsed the Balfour declaration -- does that mean elwood opposes Zionism?)
Iraq was a mistake, period, if not a criminal act on the part of the cabinet, all of whom should have known better. The people who attacked us were based in Afghanistan, Iraq had nothing to do with it, but "Afghanistan doesn't have enough good targets. We should do Iraq." And in the end, as Kerry and Obama both rightly pointed out, we sapped resources that should have gone into decisive results early in Afghanistan, to support the mistake in Iraq. Now, as Gary as rightly pointed out, we are saddled with an unwinnable situation in Afghanistan, tied to a corrupt regime, unworthy of the sacrifices our troops are making.
Fonda actually did not condemn the troops who fought in Vietnam. She condemned the policies they were ordered to carry out. And unlike elwood, she didn't actually advocate open mutiny on the ground that the orders were unlawful.
Siarlys,
Are you engaging in comedy or do you think it is bigotry to be anti-Communist.
I know a bit about Soviet history myself having written a book on the languages of the soviet republics. Lenin was indeed more liberal than his successor Stalin (who was a mass murderer). he believed in the non-Russian republics maintaining their own leadership, culture and languages -korenizatsiia or indigenization. Stali n reversed all that. Not that Lenin was an angel. He most probably ordered the execution of the Tsar and his family. Stalin killed his enemies and his friends.
The fact is Siarlys that communism has never worked and requires the strongest of central authority to run. It is responsible for the death of tens of millions.
Gary, I never said its an act of bigotry to be anti-communist. We all have a right to denounce the belief systems, philosophy, methods, and program of those we sincerely believe to be wrong. That's not akin to judging people by the color of their skin, or putting civil disabilities on those who adhere to disfavored religions.
Red baiting -- the hysterical notion that there is a communist under every bed and that your neighbor may be a covert communist, especially if they don't act like one, which is a sure sign they probably are one... that clap trap is another thing entirely.
But I called elwood a bit of a bigot because he seems to think that all people fit into neat little boxes, and if someone appears to be neither exactly what elwood considers Good, nor what elwood considers Bad, there must be Something Wrong With Him.
elwood has always been bothered by the fact that sometimes we see things eye to eye and sometimes we see things diametrically opposite, and in the world view elwood expressed here, there is no room for such a thing. There is "something wrong with him."
What exactly the relation between Lenin and Stalin was, what responsibility one has for or to the other, is a conundrum many have fought over. My current thought: Lenin was a man convinced he had the way to win, and succeeded, but he did so by subordinating everything to himself. The machinery he created was susceptible to a man like Stalin stepping in.
Lenin fought for power, but with a goal in mind. Stalin wanted power, and used it freely both to show off that he had it, and because he was paranoid, and because he carried grudges.
The machinery was flawed. There are many things we can rightly critique George Washington for, but one thing he did write was set a precedent and constitutional framework that no individual can be trusted with complete power, or indefinite rule. Robert Mugabe might have gone down in history as a great leader if he'd been subject to term limits.
However, Stalin reminds me very much of the way the "conservative" Pat McDonald stepped into control of the United Steel Workers Union. In both cases, a man who worked quietly in the shadows, did the day to day grunt work, methodically put his own people in all the key positions, made themselves almost unassailable. Fortunately, McDonald had to face elections, and I.W. Abel managed to oust him.
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