Times Change?

The LA Times, always above the level of political mudslinging practiced by the rest of the media, covers the Kerry/Fonda connection in a piece titled Vietnam War-Era Photo Seen as a Bid to Tarnish Kerry

Got that? It's Vietnam era. Ancient history. Let's read on anyway.

While many Americans know her as an Oscar-winning actress and onetime queen of aerobics videos, some Republicans hope voters will also remember Jane Fonda for a more controversial association: "Hanoi Jane."

A 1970 photograph showing Fonda and Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has surfaced on the Internet and TV news programs, fueling speculation that the GOP may try to make Kerry's anti-Vietnam War record an election issue by linking him with a former antiwar activist still reviled by many veterans.

I can't believe the GOP would seek to gain political leverage from the fact that veterans revile Kerry! Don't they know the man has a chest full of medals? Or did until he threw them away? And 1970? Dude, that is like at least two decades ago!

Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, received numerous medals for his service as a Navy patrol boat commander in Vietnam. But he returned home a disgruntled 27-year-old serviceman, and became a leading voice in the protest group Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

That explains everything! A hero who knows all too well the horrors of war. I can only imagine the utter disdain and revulsion he felt listening to all those stories in Detroit, or the sleep he lost thinking about that wounded guy he chased and killed. I'm sure his wife, ex-wife, or girlfriend can tell you about how often he wakes up screaming in the night.

The photo of Fonda and Kerry was taken two years before Fonda's Hanoi trip.

The actress, who has apologized for her actions, told CNN on Wednesday that the effort to discredit Kerry by an association with her was part of "the big lie."

See? She apologized. That doesn't matter to those "big liars" though.

"Any attempt to link Kerry to me and make him look bad with that connection is completely false. We were at a rally for veterans at the same time. I don't even think we shook hands," Fonda said of the 1970 photograph.

Hanoi Jane doesn't get it. Nor does the LA Times. It's not about whether you shook his hand or even if you're his current mistress. The problem is what both of you stand for in the eyes of the vast majority of veterans.

"This was an organization of men who risked their lives in Vietnam, who considered themselves totally patriotic," she said, referring to Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"So anyone who slams that organization and slams Kerry for being part of it is doing an injustice to veterans. How can you impugn, how can you even suggest, that anyone like Kerry or any of these veterans were not patriotic? He was a hero there."

No doubt many were heroes. Many others, like Kerry, discredited themselves thoroughly in their opportunistic post-war betrayal of everything the true heroes fought for. Many others in that group were posers and liars.

John Hurley, national director of veterans affairs for the Kerry campaign, said he had not seen the photo but downplayed its significance.

"John Kerry's war record speaks for itself," Hurley said. "His war service earned him the right to speak out against what he thought was an immoral war. A lot of very considerable people opposed that war. John Kerry was one of them."

Once it became apparent that it served his best personal interests to do so. Now, of course, he's a "war hero with a chest full of medals" again.

Paul Galanti, a former Navy pilot who spent more than six years in North Vietnamese captivity, said that the image of Fonda still makes many veterans angry.

He described a U.S. Marine friend at the U.S. Naval Academy who several years ago encountered a group of female midshipmen working out to a Jane Fonda exercise video.

"He took the video out of the machine, threw it on the floor and smashed it with his foot," Galanti said. "They were too young to even know who Jane Fonda was. But he was a Vietnam veteran. He'll never forget her."

And it's not just her; it's everything she represents. She's an icon, not of fitness, but of "unfitness" - for the benefits of being American, and the press just doesn't get it.

Republican strategist Arnold Steinberg dismissed any connection between Wednesday's debate over the Kerry-Fonda photo with Democratic criticism of President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the Air National Guard.

"I don't think they're related," he said. "But now that Kerry seems likely to become the Democratic nominee for president, the Republicans are going to try and define him in the eyes of the American public."

And, Steinberg added, "just the visual association with someone as infamous as Jane Fonda in the eyes of many suggests a level of irresponsibility not normally associated with a candidate for president."

At least that. Strangely unnoticed (meaning: intentionally ignored) by the mainstream press, it's not the "Republicans" (meaning Republican leadership) who are pushing the Kerry/Fonda issue. While the chairman of the DNC and a member of the house besmirching the President, with full support of the White House Press Corps and most of the rest of the "mainstream media", it's talk radio, blogs, and veteran's web sites and e-mail networks pushing this.

Democrats scoffed at a maneuver one advisor called "goofy in the extreme."

What maneuver?

"This isn't your father's Democratic Party. If they think the line of attack that worked for Joe McCarthy or George Bush Sr. is going to work on John Kerry, they're sadly mistaken," said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist who in 1992 helped Bill Clinton fight charges that he ducked the draft.

They who?

Citing Kerry's decorated war service, he said "on three different occasions John Kerry so annoyed the communists that they shot him. It would be difficult to paint him as a communist."

No, but it's quite easy to paint him as a man with very little in the way of a solid foundation, and a propensity to go whichever way the wind blows. If a reputation as a communist could get him votes he'd appear onstage in drab, unisex coveralls at all his remaining campaign rallies. (Though I doubt he'd offer to share his millions.)