The Clintons are the gift that keeps on giving, but only in
small ways these days. He and She are always out there, grabbing a
few column inches on page 1 or page 3, jostling lesser beings out
of the line-of-sight between the lens and their mugs. It’s all
small, incremental stuff now, gradually removing the liberal
tarnish from her moderate pose in preparation for the ‘08 campaign.
Much rarer, and consequently much more treasured, is the return of
an old gift — or in this case, an old affliction — after a very
long time. Jane Fonda’s return to politics opens too many old
wounds.
Seems like just yesterday when she posed on a North Vietnamese
anti-aircraft gun, looking so serious, so concerned and so
sensitive as the NVA jollied her along on her first “Damn the U.S.
Fighting Man” tour. Was it just before — no, as I remember it was
a bit after — that she and the recently-returned-from-Paris Vichy
John Kerry were pitching a fit back here. She’d disappeared after
she gained her wish: we withdrew from Vietnam, leaving our allies
to be murdered, and the rest of Southeast Asia to come under the
sway of those such as Pol Pot. She kinda sorta apologized for her
trip to North Vietnam, but the enormity of what she and her ilk —
including Sen. Kerry — caused in that part of the world is beyond
her ken.
Now, the worst has happened. Or is it the best? It may have been
inevitable, but now it’s true: Hanoi Jane is launching the most
awful comeback since Burt Reynolds decided to play Boss Hogg. And
where once stood the svelte Hanoi Jane, we shall now gaze upon the
nipped-and-tucked Baghdad Barbarella.
According to the press coverage yesterday, Baghdad Barbarella is
going on a cross-country bus tour next March to call for withdrawal
— i.e., retreat — from Iraq. She of course claims to be
responding to the calls for action she’s heard from Iraq vets on
her current book tour (no, she couldn’t be doing this just to hawk
a book, could she?) and promises that vets will accompany her on
the tour. Too bad her bus tour won’t reprise the North Vietnam
trip. If she visited the terrorist camps in Syria, she’d surely be
welcomed. It would be an event worth targeting, er, covering.
It’s perfectly wonderful that she should choose to do this in
the early part of a campaign year. How many congressmen and
senators will be eager to step up to her microphone and chant,
“Hey, hey Dick Chay-nay, how many kids have you killed today” or
“Hell no, we won’t go” with BB? Other than Dennis Kucinich and
Cynthia McKinney, there’s nary a one who will cock an arm to pitch
someone else’s medals over the Capitol fence. Not even John Kerry
will do that this time. I’d bet even Howlin’ Howie won’t give her a
shout.
Republicans can make this a wonderful campaign tool if they have
the stomach for it. How many R’s will take the microphone in a
debate, and demand their opponent join them in condemning Fonda?
How many new campaign ads for 2008 will come out of the bus tour?
(Note to Messrs. Mehlman and Rove: this time, youse guys have
surpassed yourselves. I always suspected that Kerry was taking your
shilling, but to get Fonda back in the game you must have come up
with an offer she couldn’t refuse, such as a lifetime supply of
Botox. Geniuses, both of you.)
And for Mizz Fonda, how much fun will she have when she’s met by
a picket line of Vietnam Vets — joined by Afghanistan and Iraq
vets — everywhere she goes? You’ll see them everywhere: walking on
canes, in wheel chairs, on their feet by the hundreds and
thousands. Fonda is a symbol of everything that was wrong with
America in the 1960s. Self-absorbed, fearful, convinced America is
an evil influence on the world and consequently eager to help
defeat America, she and those who marched with her lost a war that
should have been won, and could have.
We lost Vietnam, but losing it didn’t cost us our way of life.
We suffered, or at least those who served and the families of those
who didn’t come back did. But America recovered and became itself
again. There’s a difference today: if we lose this war — in Iraq
or anywhere else — we lose America. Fonda will have little effect
on this war. In fact, the only thing she will accomplish is to
bring another round of scorn upon herself. It will be both awful
and an awful lot of fun to watch her latest anti-American campaign
unfold. We should hang on her every word, because each will be one
more round in our ammo box to be fired back at the Kerrys and
Kennedys, Deans and Durbins and Clintons who want to pretend they
can be trusted with our nation’s security. Fonda will be the
albatross hanging around every Democratic neck in 2006 and, I pray,
in 2008.
The only thing that could possibly be better than this is to
find that she’s run off with Dick Durbin.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004).
