Something prompted by the preceding

You may have noticed - probably not, but maybe - that my link list has been tightened. I dropped sites previously listed as MIA (my standard for which was no posts for at least 90 days) as well as those that have gone dark. There will likely be more changes coming, including deletions and possibly some additions, because I decided that I wanted to keep it to ones I actually read, even if only occasionally.

One thing that I have found of late is that I just can no longer maintain interest in bloggers whose main political concern in life seems to be the daily comings and goings of Democratic Party politics and drooling with glee over whatever zinger Harry "Mr. Minority" Reid or Howard "Da Man" Dean might have let loose that day and musing how if the Dems would only do this or shade their position on that or shift just a bit to the right on the other that then they'd by gosh win them some elections! And how if they'd just let go of "loser" positions (usually abortion rights and/or gun control), they'd gobble up summa those "red" states and then the Good Guys would be back in charge! Woo-hoo!

Oh, and of course, that's provided they're "tough" on defense and don't look "soft" on terrorism by, oh, I dunno, suggesting we actually get out of Iraq or hinting that they're against the war itself instead of just how it's being run or - God forbid! - proposing that a just foreign policy is a better deterrent to terrorism than bombing runs and TRAITOR Acts. No, what Democrats must do instead is demand - demand, I say - that Bush tell us what he intends to do about Iraq and terrorism! Please. Not that they propose doing anything that's actually, you know, different or anything.

Someone who has now joined the ranks of those in who I can no longer maintain interest is prime-time blogger Oliver Willis, who has disappeared from my link list. Not that it will make a damned bit of difference to him, either politically or practically. But I have no time for this kind of bullshit:

[W]hen I see that Jane Fonda is going to go around in a van powered by vegetable oil protesting I sort of throw up in my mouth a little.

Some of these celebrities need to shut up.

It turns out in the course of comments that it's not "some" celebrities to who Willis would give the O'Reilley treatment, it's one celebrity: Fonda. Why? Because, doused with self-righteousness and bursting with self-congratulation, Willis declares that

[y]ou see, I'm the kind of Democrat who stands up for what I believe in, and I think Jane Fonda praising the North Vietnamese while we were fighting them in a bad war was a horrible thing and anyone who defends that is off their rocker.

So, suffused with the rightwing Kool-Aid version of Jane Fonda, Willis want to take what she did 33 years ago (before he was born, that is) and read her out of the ranks of those who are allowed to have an opinion today.

Now, there are those who cynically note that she made the announcement during a tour promoting her latest book. (I admit to having pangs of that feeling myself.) And there are others who argue the planned protest tour is a bad idea, a tactical mistake, because, as Fonda herself admits, she carries a lot of baggage from Vietnam. That is an arguable position. But it's not the argument Willis makes. He argues, rather, that because of Vietnam, Jane Fonda should just shut up. Apparently, for good. The fact that she's apologized for the notorious picture of her on an NVA anti-aircraft gun and for not believing returning POWs when they told of their ill-treatment is irrelevant. The fact that she has admitted she was quite politically naive at the time (something to which I, having seen her arguing the issue in television encounters, can definitely attest) is irrelevant. What is relevant, it appears, is that she said it at all and what's more, she has not apologized for opposing the war and for maintaining that the Vietnamese had the legitimate right to resist US aggression. (And she damn well shouldn't.)

Frankly, Willis is or rather has become a jackass. A jackass who goes on about how liberal he is while saying he agrees with many DLC positions, it's just that they don't know how to pull it off right. A jackass who says he is "against this war in Iraq as much as the next left-winger" but who has insisted that Democrats do not want to "cut and run." Most importantly for my purposes here, a jackass who seems genuinely caught up in the fantasy that oh, my, if only the Democrats were in charge, what a wonderful world this would be! Yeah, the Democrats. The Democrats of NAFTA, of the WTO, of the Defense of Marriage Act, of "ending welfare as we know it," of Sudan, of Bosnia, of 500,000 dead Iraqi children "is worth it," of enforcing illegal "no-fly" zones. Those Democrats.

And like I said, I just have no more time for that kind of bullshit.

LiberalOasis is also a candidate for link list demise, but for the moment it's staying because even though it focuses on (indeed, it's raison d'être) is Democratic Party strategy, still it provides enough useful information to merit repeat visits. (One recent example being its discussion of Slipper Gonzales' appearance on Face the Nation, in which he admitted that not only did he get the Department of Justice to agree to let him wait 12 hours before he issued a "preserve all documents" order to White House staff when the Valerie Plame investigation opened, he gave White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card a heads-up that the order would be forthcoming.)

Now, again, I know Oliver Willis couldn't care less about my link or my opinion and I'm sure LiberalOasis cares just as little. But I'm just damn tired of reading how the most important possible political achievement in all of humanity would be electing another couple of Democrats, even if they're Joe Liebermans and Zell Millers (or even "liberals" such as Evan Bayh and Joe Biden, who were among the 18 Senate Democrats and 75 in the House who voted in favor of that horrendous bankruptcy bill). It's a waste of time. And I just don't want to do it any more.

Footnote: Back to Jane Fonda for a moment. Most people would agree there is such a thing as a legitimate right of national self-defense against invasion. I will note that I am ethically opposed to such violence and so do not agree with the argument except as such resistance is limited to nonviolent methods which can include such as demonstrations, blockades, strikes, and nonviolent sabotage, i.e., gumming up the works. In either event, if you accept the notion that people have a right to resist invasion, and if you opposed the US invasion of Iraq, you must also accept the notion that it is quite possible to argue that the invasion was illegitimate but the resistance to it by insurgents, as least as it is aimed at military targets, is legitimate.

And, indeed, there are those today who look at Iraq and say exactly that: The US should bug out but the use of force by insurgents against military targets is exercising a legitimate right of national self-defense. My question is, would Oliver Willis want to read such people out of the left, out of "legitimate" debate, silence them, tell them to shut up? Would he say that the Iraqis have no right to resist the US presence? Or that "now that we're there" we have the right to crush all resistance under our heel?

No? Then how can he label Jane Fonda's opposition to Vietnam "a horrible thing" and tell her to shut up when that is exactly that same as she was saying: the war is wrong and the Vietnamese have a right to defend themselves?

"Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana