Oh that Jahar Tsarnaev, isn’t he totally cool and dreamy? Not content with lionizing Robert Redford for his recent cinematic encomium supporting Bill Ayers’ efforts in bombing the Pentagon and other targets, Rolling Stone magazine — whose readership increasingly overlaps with AARP magazine, finally discovers a youthful terrorist with vintage Springsteen-style facial topiary to celebrate.
Greg Gutfeld of Fox’s Red Eye sums up Rolling Stone’s morally repugnant cover “in 50 Seconds:”
So I just read the Rolling Stone piece with the shitbag on the cover. It’s long, but i can summarize it for you:“Wow, here’s a really good looking cool kid who loves to smoke weed (a lot — isn’t that cool and funny!) and seems super cool and all his friends just think he’s the “bomb.” He has such great hair!!!!
Oh — sorry – and then the cute guy does something really really bad, and it’s like totally weird because he was such a cool dude –and he was smart and stuff, and a great fighter and girls liked him! He seems really cute to me, anyway!!! :)
and when someone cool does something REALLY BAD WE THINK then we are really sad. :(
Or as Jim Treacher writes, “Apparently you can do whatever you want, kill anybody you want, as long as Jann Wenner thinks you’re cute:”
As per the hottest magazine of 1974:
In the new issue of Rolling Stone, contributing editor Janet Reitman delivers a deeply reported account of the life and times of Boston bomber Jahar Tsarnaev. Reitman spent the last two months interviewing dozens of sources – childhood and high school friends, teachers, neighbors and law enforcement agents, many of whom spoke for the first time about the case – to deliver a riveting and heartbreaking account of how a charming kid with a bright future became a monster.
Islam? Was it Islam? I’m just speculating here.
Incidentally, the liberal mayor of Boston, a city still recovering from the Tsarnaev’s youthful indiscretions, is not amused by Rolling Stone’s cover. Neither is Kmart, Rite-Aid, Walgreens and CVS. (Presumably, most Rolling Stone readers like to pick up a copy of the magazine in the checkout line while buying their weekly bottle of Geritol.)
On the other hand, the Washington Post is pretty cool with the cover. Which isn’t all that surprising; in a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army credited America’s “liberal” media for helping America lose the war:
What did the North Vietnamese leadership think of the American antiwar movement? What was the purpose of the Tet Offensive? How could the U.S. have been more successful in fighting the Vietnam War? Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, answers these questions in the following excerpts from an interview conducted by Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human-rights activist. Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later became editor of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He now lives in Paris, where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with the fruits of Vietnamese communism.
Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”
Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory?
A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.
Q: Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits? A: Keenly. Q: Why? A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.
But at least in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there usually wasn’t quite such an obviously direct line between Rolling Stone’s cover stars and terrorism.
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