Love her or hate her: Jane Fonda is on Fresh Air today (NPR)

[Ernesto]

She is (of course) hawking her new book, but the interview by Terry Gross could be interesting.

[MsAnthropy]

1. I put her with Robert McNamara

in the "mistakes were made" category. For all the damage they both caused, their late admission of regrets is of no comfort.

[eissa]

2. I adore her

Her one lapse of judgment should not overshadow a lifetime dedicated to anti-war movements, and women's/children's health.

[dsewell]

3. Do progressives have any reason to respect her?

Whatever one might think pro or contra her Vietnam War-era actions, it seems to me she has long since lost any political credibility on any front. Maybe I'm being unfair, since I have paid very little attention to her career in the last couple of decades.

Personally, I thought that her self-reinvention as fitness guru was evidence of the shallowness of her antiwar activity--more of a trendy bandwagon thing than a result of deeply held convictions. I also can't get out of my head the image of her I saw on TV a few years ago, as Mrs. Ted Turner, mindlessly doing the "tomahawk chop" at a Braves game, something I found viscerally offensive.

So I've always put her in the "with friends like these, who needs enemies" category. But I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong.

[not systems]

4. I think your correct. n/t

[Ernesto]

5. As an USMC Viet vet

I've really never been pissed about her going to Hanoi....... She did sooooooo much to help bring that wrongful war to an end.

[Kolesar]

6. I was 13 when the US withdrew from Vietnam

I remember the Fonda in Hanoi story, I read about it, but I never could get worked up about it. I think the fuss is about right wing messaging.

[Ironpost]

7. I loved her then and I love her now.

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. I never had a real problem with her going to N Vietnam,

a country that we never declared war on even while dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions on it. Even letting herself be photographed sitting in the seat of an AA gun wasn't so bad -- as an actor I can understand wanting to get the visceral feeling of being in that position, imagining being attacked by fleets of B-52s. It's only regrettable that she was forced on the defensive and was never allowed to publicly explain her action.

To hear some people say it, she was shooting the thing herself. She was not some Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw Haw, spewing enemy propaganda for month after month from the enemy heartland.

I have always admired her commitment to ending the war. I don't think, however, that anything she did had much effect one way or the other, in the long run.

[noonwitch]

9. I can see why vietnam veterens might have issues with her

But I don't. She has a great plastic surgeon, I saw her on 60 Minutes Sunday and she really looks good.

[western mass]

10. Very different from the 60 minutes interview...

After hearing her call the "AA gun photo" as the biggest mistake of her life, etc., on 60 minutes, I was ready to dismiss her as a pathetic flake turned right-wing born-again Christian.

As I listen to the Terry Gross interview now, it's clear that the 60 minutes piece gave a pretty misleading impression, edited to be very right-wing friendly (surprise surprise). On NPR, Fonda has alot of disparaging things to say about the Vietnam war, right-wingers, etc., and seem to imply that her regret about the AA-gun incident is mostly about the ammunition it gave to right-wing freaks. The 60 minutes piece also failed to include much of her talk about why she went to N Vietnam--to document Nixon's criminal bombing of civilian targets, war crimes that make sitting on a crappy little gun laughable in comparison.

She does and always has struck me as basically flaky (just as much as any random person, I suppose), but all of the latest furor seems to be just the usual right-wing spin-drivel.