Fish Fear Me

Jane Fonda's Real Unforgivable Mistake

Jane Fonda repeats that she is terribly sorry about sitting in that anti-aircraft gun during her shameful Hanoi trip:

“I made one unforgivable mistake when I was in North Vietnam, and I will go to my grave with this,” Jane Fonda says on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

The actress and activist made an infamous trip to North Vietnam in 1972 where she was photographed singing with members of the North Vietnamese military as she sat on an anti-aircraft gun.

As stupid as that was, it's just a minor facet of her overall crime of embracing a monstrous regime.

Ho Chi Minh was not simply a nationalist, he was a murderous communist who founded and ruled a totalitarian state. He didn't do that by winning elections over his opponents, he had them slaughtered by the thousands and then imposed his will on the people. He used the fanatical and barbaric Viet Cong to slaughter and terrorize the peasants of South Vietnam by the tens of thousands until the VC were finally crushed after the Tet offensive, itself a massive war crime from the North.

And Jane Fonda kissed his ass.

I'm well aware of the crimes and faults of the South Vietnamese regimes, but Fonda and friends magnified those to an extreme while being willfully blind and even apologetic toward the atrocities by and for North Vietnam.

One side in that war offered the flaws and hopes of freedom and democracy. The other offered subservience to one-party rule and a soul crushing police state.

Fonda and friends chose the latter, and no amount of remorse over some petty act can cover up the shame and sin of that.

Joseph Stalin Is Still Dead

Sixty years ago today Joseph Stalin took the big dirt nap, and possibly began serving a sentence of eternal torment. I don't know for sure about the latter as such matters are far above my pay grade, but I have a strong suspicion. 

I have neither time nor patience for Stalin apologists. He was a monster, and as Anne Applebaum notes, one whose tally of corpses we can't even truly count:

"A single round number of dead victims would be extremely satisfying, particularly since it would allow us to compare Stalin directly with Hitler or with Mao. Yet even if we could find one, I'm not sure it would really tell the whole story of suffering either. No official figures, for example, can possibly reflect the mortality of the wives and children and aging parents left behind, since their deaths were not recorded separately. During the war, old people starved to death without ration cards: had their convict son not been digging coal in Vorkuta, they might have lived. Small children succumbed easily to epidemics of typhus and measles in cold, ill-equipped orphanages: had their mothers not been sewing uniforms in Kengir, they might have lived too.

"Nor can any figures reflect the cumulative impact of Stalin's repressions on the life and health of whole families. A man was tried and shot as an "enemy of the people"; his children grew up in orphanages and joined criminal gangs; his mother died of stress and grief; his cousins and aunts and uncles cut off all contact from one another, in order to avoid being tainted as well. Families broke apart, friendships ended, fear weighed heavily on those who remained behind, even when they did not die."

It's almost unbearable to imagine the pain and despair of one prisoner caught in that pitiless system let alone multiply it by millions. There's simply too much horror. I suppose letting the enormity of it numb them is how the apologists get by.

Ah, who am I trying to kid? Burn in Hell, Joe.

Donald Kaul, Gun Salesman Extraordinaire

Previously I had figured that I would live the rest of my life without ever buying an "assault" rifle. This guy has maybe changed my mind:

Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

That's after repealing the Second Amendment, of course.

This is the extra special part in my opinion:

If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

Yeah, it's totally awesome to have the cops gunning people down. And if the people shoot back? Well, it's not like Kaul himself will try to go get those guns, that's what the hired help is for. So we lose a few good cops. You gotta break a few eggs...yada yada.

Kaul's twisted fantasy has zero chance of ever happening, but that's not the problem. The problem is the diseased mind(or soul) that came up with it and so glibly puts it out there for all to see. Because deep down I bet he, and millions of Americans like him, really would do something along those lines if they could.

Kaul's hostility to lawful gun owners is by no means alone. I've read a number of pieces in respectable sites that directly assign guilt for the Newtown shooting to all gun owners, like this one from Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.

"Complicit in the murder of those children."  Does anyone think that Gopnik, having pronounced that judgment on gun owners, would actually stop there if he was granted his wish for a gun ban? Of course not. We don't let murderers off scot free, especially murderers of children. What punishment Gopnik would have in mind for the now disarmed gun owners I will leave to your imagination.

I bet Gopnik wouldn't stop there either. Perhaps uniting with the professor in Austria who recently advocated for the death penalty for global warming skeptics would be his next project. So much moral culpability and punishment to be assigned, so little time.

Kaul, Gopnik, and that professor are not cranks in the sense of being oddballs, as they all write for or work at what are considered reputable organizations. They so easily spew out their eliminationist rhetoric and express their desire for collective punishment against their political foes because that's natural to the environment they operate in. The professor got pushed back at his university because of public outrage, but Kaul and Gopnik will pay no price where they work. In fact, they are almost certainly admired for "speaking truth to power" or some such nonsense.

When that mentality no longer exists then I will be receptive to arguments that we don't need guns as insurance against tyranny. In the meantime, let's hear it for Kaul, Gopnik, and all the other vocal gun control extremists. I have a message to them from the gun manufacturers:

"Keep up the good work."

Say, Is It Hot Enough For You, Che?

Forty-five years ago today an extrajudicial murder in Bolivia ended the life of the psychopath known as Che. I'll never give my approval to such actions, but the heavy irony that he died that way after overseeing the sham trials and extrajudicial murders of thousands of others leaves me coldly indifferent to his. 

His image remains as quite useful for identifying a fair number of the tools and assholes who would see us follow the same murderous and dismal path that Che helped Cuba down. I find it astonishing that some people buy and proudly wear or display stuff with his image printed on it, or that someone of such(former) stature as a Robert Redford would treat him sympathetically, but there it is.

My thoughts today lie with Che's victims, and perhaps those unknowns who are alive today because he got whacked in rural Bolivia forty-five years ago. To Hell with the totalitarians, as always.

25 Years Ago Today: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

It was 25 years ago today that President Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and delivered a speech that reverberated throughout the totalitarian regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The most famous part:

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate.

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.

Mr. Gorbachev -- Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

For me, an equally stirring passage came near the end of Reagan's speech:

As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner (quote):

"This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality."

Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall, for it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

The speech was not well received by the Soviets, nor by prominent Democrats of the time:

In The Ambition and the Power (p. 486) John Barry reports how House Speaker Jim Wright (D., Texas) reacted:

Wright’s face hardened. Reagan’s declaration had destroyed any chance of the wall coming down, since Gorbachev could not appear to bow to him. Wright fumed, “It just makes me have utter contempt for Reagan. He spoiled the chance for a dramatic breakthrough in relations between our two countries It bespeaks his pettiness and self-centeredness. He just couldn’t bear Gorbachev doing it of his own volition.”

But if you watch it or read the text of the speech, it was clearly a genuine, heartfelt, and completely accurate warning that the rest of humanity was rapidly advancing for the better and the people of the Eastern Bloc were about to be left far behind. It was an invitation, almost a plea to join the West in that promising future. As was the case throughout his presidency though, Reagan's plain words of truth about freedom and humanity were criticized as bellicose by the Soviets and their craven apologists in the West.

The communists rejected it at the time, as their ideology commanded them. A few years later of course, their whole stinking, rotten, totalitarian system came crashing down anyway. Thank God. 

It doesn't seem possible anymore, but millions of my peers and I spent a good chunk of the 1980s training to fight those bastards if it came down to that(And, of course, millions of others preceded us). Thankfully it never happened, despite that war-mongering asshole Reagan, as the Left described him.

I never thought of him that way. There were times when I thought that a war was inevitable, but not because of Reagan. I liked Reagan as Commander-in-Chief because everybody knew he would stand up to any challenge from the Soviets, and so the Soviets never challenged him. No, war would come from perceived weakness and miscalculation, and that never happened despite the best efforts of Reagan's detractors.

God Bless you, Ronald Reagan. RIP.

 

Told You So

Well this is kind of amusing. The other day I did a post on Nanny Bloomberg and wrote:

You've got to stand up to Nanny Bloomberg this time, because if you don't he's never going to stop. When he gets done with this one he'll find something else to scold and harass you about eating or doing. Hmmmm, what will be next for the portion police? Candy? Maybe alcohol? Oooh, I know: No servings of beef over four ounces. 

And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a column from totalitarian jackass of the day Michael Tomasky, who while defending Bloomberg writes this: 

Are bacon-cheeseburgers next? As a practical matter, no. Sodas are an easy target because there is nothing, nothing, nutritionally redeeming about them. But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things.

Hahaha. I told you so. It may not be happening yet, but those little totalitarian fuckwads are thinking ahead and they are not going to stop with soda sizes if they win.

This is the inevitable result of more and more health care costs moving from private insurance payments to government payments.

When society socializes costs through private insurance, the insurance companies can and do charge more for whatever risk factors their customers think are reasonable. You're still free to indulge in that risk factor within reason, you just pay more.

When society socializes costs through government, it's an excuse for little totalitarian fuckwads like Michael Tomasky to crawl out of their holes and try to run your life.

Tomaskey is certainly free to opine that "Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things." I defend his right to hold that opinion. He is also free to never consume a burger that's larger than four ounces if he doesn't want to do so. I defend that right too.

What he is not free to do, is take away my right to buy and eat whatever damn hamburger I can afford. The day that happens, I'm going to pound his little totalitarian fuckwad ass right into the ground.

Sorry to be so forceful, but I truly loathe totalitarians of all types. Please keep in mind though, that that is not a threat, it's a promise I make regarding something that I really don't see happening. I do not seek to harm Mr. Tomasky now or in the currently foreseeable future. I have absolutely no desire to even discourage him from writing about his stupid little totalitarian fuckwad beliefs. Believe what you want, Tomasky. Preach it to the heavens as is your right.

Be advised though: The day he actually gets between me and the half-pound burger of my choice...