Because I hated Barbarella, I’m outraged by Jane Fonda’s trip to Vietnam

Loomis is right — this bit of red-baiting is pretty absurd, though not quite as obnoxious as this 2006 David Boaz piece, from which Yglesias finds support for his childhood loathing of Pete Seeger’s music.

Not to, you know, defend folk singers or anything, but the fact that Seeger’s views on World War II changed several times from 1939 to 1941 is hardly unique and marks him as “Stalin’s songbird” (David Boaz’s phrase) only in the sloppiest and most circumstantial of ways; indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find many Americans — “Stalinist” or otherwise — who did not follow a similar course. Moreover, Seeger’s departure from the CPUSA in 1950, several years before Uncle Joe’s fortunate and belated demise makes it difficult to cast him as a “hard-core Stalinist” no matter what his views on the Cold War might have been. If “previous affiliation with” is going to be the new “hard-core,” I suppose we’ll have to start thinking of Ann Althouse as a “hard-core Feingoldian,” which would be pretty goddamned silly.