The Other McCain

This is just so mysterious, isn’t it?

I was to have been on QVC today to introduce my book, “Prime Time,” about aging and the life cycle. The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear. I am, to say the least, deeply disappointed that QVC caved to this kind of insane pressure by some well funded and organized political extremist groups. And that they did it without talking to me first. . . . Most people don’t buy into the far right lies. . . .
Bottom line, this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us . . .

UPDATE: Linked by POH Diaries — thanks!

Let me take the opportunity to say here that I don’t like boycotts. I dislike the “I Don’t Like Your Opinions So I’m Going to Get You Fired” approach to political debate. The Left has often used these tactics toward conservatives — every major talk radio host has experienced such efforts — and it’s wrong.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and it would be wrong to endorse such tactics against leftists. I do not want to see conservatives imitate, e.g., Media Matters’ dishonest partisan jihad against Fox News. However, the obtrusive facts in this incident with Jane Fonda are:

• Her insistence that those protesting to QVC are “well funded and organized,” so that she is being “Swiftboated,” as they say. But Fonda provides no evidence of any funding or organization behind these protests, which for all we know are entirely organic and spontaneous.
• Her dishonest assertion that she is targeted by “right-wing lies.”

Jane Fonda’s outspoken support for America’s communist enemies, and her 1972 propaganda tour of North Vietnam, are simply facts of history:

In 1971 Fonda was the chief financier of VVAW’s Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI), which took place in Detroit from January 31 through February 2 of that year. The largest war crimes tribunal held in the U.S. during the Vietnam War, WSI featured a host of VVAW members who related gruesome stories of atrocities they claimed to have participated in or witnessed in Vietnam; they insisted that rape, torture and murder were standard practices for the American military. In reality, WSI was a continuation of the anti-U.S. war crimes propaganda campaign which had begun in Europe with KGB-sponsored events that were organized before the first American ground troops ever arrived in Vietnam. Several of the WSI discussion panel moderators were radical leaders who had previously met with top North Vietnamese and Vietcong representatives in Hanoi and Paris. Also present were leftist psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinicians, who pressured the witnesses to help end the war by publicly confessing their “crimes.”
In July-August 1972 Fonda made her infamous trip to North Vietnam. By this time, over 50,000 Americans had been killed in the war. While there, she posed for pictures on an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes, and she volunteered to do a radio broadcast from Hanoi. She made approximately eight radio addresses, during which she told American pilots in the area:
“Use of these bombs or condoning the use of these bombs makes one a war criminal … Examine the reasons given to justify the murder you are being paid to commit … I don’t know what your officers tell you … but [your] weapons are illegal and that’s not just rhetoric … The men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law, and in the past, in Germany and Japan, men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed.”
Fonda also quoted Ho Chi Minh during some of these broadcasts. She referred to President Richard Nixon as a “new-type Hitler,” and advised South Vietnamese soldiers to desert: “You are being used as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism.”
These radio addresses were aired repeatedly by the North Vietnamese Communists, for whom propaganda was a key tool of psychological warfare; they used the broacasts not only to hearten their own citizens, but also to undermine the American public’s will to go forward with the war, and to crush the morale of U.S. and allied forces. . . .

Fonda cannot in good conscience accuse her critics of lying. The facts are against her and, if she refuses to recant or apologize for her pro-communist activities, she at least ought to stop unfairly smearing her critics.