Just Wait Til Roger Vadim Runs for President…

A chunk of the Web has become obsessed with this photograph, which shows John Kerry and Jane Fonda "together." That is, they're in the same crowd shot.

Not very scintillating, I know. Which is why a number of people prefer the photograph here, which puts the pair on the same platform. Trouble is, it's a fake -- someone spliced in the image of Fonda and wrote a transparently phony caption. (Newspapers will make capitalization errors from time to time, but never so many in the same sentence. It's also in a suspiciously contemporary font.)

It's no secret why Kerry's enemies would want to "link" John with Jane, given the seething hatred American veterans feel for Barbarella. And it ought to be easy to tie them together, right? After all, they both spoke out against the war.

But most people don't despise Fonda because she was anti-war. They despise her because she went to North Vietnam, denied that her hosts were torturing their POWs, and posed with the weapons used to kill American soldiers. Kerry, of course, did nothing of the kind; indeed, he was one of those soldiers himself. Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman notes, the intersection between Kerry's activism and Fonda's took place two years before Jane's infamous excursion. So you can't even say he was turning a blind eye to the actress's activities.

Bush backers had better hope their man's campaign isn't mixed up with these smears. It would be a bad sign if they were this desperate this early.