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17 July, 1998

The flap over the Tailwind story neither excites nor surprises me. It is just another deja-vu all over again, as Yogi would say.  How many similar smear jobs – many quite successful -  have we seen during the past decades? Let’s recall the tactics used against General Westmoreland, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Let’s recall the many false stories about American atrocities and perfidious foreign policy out of  Southeast Asia and Central America. Some of the gnomes who despised American politics and the projection of American power then are still in their jobs, eager to cook up disinformation as of old. They have also done a sterling job of inculcating their attitudes and beliefs into the next generation of journalists.  In their own peculiar misuse of the label, Americans call these people liberals. Actually, they are leftists. There is a memorable statement that George Orwell made to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals, in his column in the Tribune on 1 Sept., 1944,  when they were misrepresenting and/or excusing the Soviet betrayal of the Polish Warsaw uprising in WW II :

“Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

We can bring Orwell’s statement up to contemporary standards by changing only the last sentence to: “Once a Jane Fonda, always a Jane Fonda.”  Most Americans will understand the implications of that sentence. Really, the Jane Fondas just can not help it when presented with the opportunity to blacken America’s reputation.