Howard Kurtz Doesn't Get ItUsually I find him perceptive, but he comes off
completely clueless on the first part of this column, where he talks about conservative reactions to Jane Fonda's vegetable oil tour.
Kurtz links some teeny-tiny blogs to prove his point about the Right-Wing blogosphere:
It took only a few nanoseconds for the right side of the blogosphere to get fired up.
It took, in fact, only two words: Jane Fonda.
News that the actress and activist is planning an antiwar bus tour was greeted by calmly reasoned analysis.The
Conservative Zone sounds impressive, but it's had about 5600 hits on sitemeter. Looks like a serious blogger though, and I certainly am not going to fault him for some anger on the Fonda thing; she got her reputation the old fashioned way.
"Hanoi Jane is at it again. . . . In 1972, she committed Treason when she collaborated with the enemy and urged that US soldiers quit fighting. Today, she is calling for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, leaving them in the lurch and unable to withstand the terrorist forces.
"This B-I-T-C-H is a traitor twice now in my eyes. She has the right to voice her opinions, but her past actions have branded her a traitor and she deserves to be treated like one."The
Simi Valley Sophist, who's been posting for about 2 months and does not appear to have a sitemeter.
"No matter how you slice and dice it, a traitor is still a traitor. Jane Fonda is back in the anti-war game, and this time it is the war in Iraq."Pirate's Cove is
a serious blog with an established readership, but of course by now Kurtz has the supposedly inflammatory stuff, so the quoted passage is as follows:
"Jane, You Ignorant Slut"
"So she is going to revisit her Vietnam days, and all the atrocities against American troops that she herself caused, to promote her book?"The odd thing is that Kurtz could have hit any of the larger conservative blogs and found much the same sentiment perhaps with a tiny bit less vitriol, so it's not fair to say that he mischaracterizes completely our side of the aisle. And I'm glad to see smaller conservative blogs getting linked. So I guess my point is that on this story it doesn't matter but on others it might.
The larger problem is that Kurtz just doesn't get the reaction on our side to Jane Fonda. I can't think of a Republican blogger who has a good thing to say about her. She's ironically in many ways the caricature that libs present of Republicans: born into incredible wealth and fame, given her own wealth largely on the basis of her name (and looks), not her talent, then later used her celebrity to hawk products on TV and eventually hooked a billionnaire. And of course somewhere in there managed to find time to laugh and pretend to be shooting down US flyers with an anti-aircraft gun.
And that's what most of us hate her for. We heard during Vietnam and we've heard during Iraq that the anti-war folks support the troops. For one brief moment Jane Fonda showed that she didn't. It's not going to be forgiven with endless apology/book tours which demonstrate that what she's sorry for is that she has to pay for mistakes she made in the past, not that she made them, and heaven forfend, not that she was wrong about the war.
