Honoring the Wrong Vietnam

Just to show you how far left our California legislature has gone, just take a look at who the Speaker of the House is honoring (from Political Diary):

Jane Fonda's Invitation Was Lost in the Mail

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the defeat of South Vietnam and its absorption by the Communist North. In few places will that event be marked with more sadness and bitterness than the Vietnamese exile communities of California. That also explains why Republican Assemblyman Van Tran, the first Vietnamese American elected to the California Legislature, was upset last week when a high-ranking official of the Communist Vietnamese government was honored on the floor of the state Assembly.

Democratic Speaker Fabian Nunez apparently thought nothing of officially recognizing Phung Huu Phu, chairman of the Hanoi People's Parliament, during a legislative session. But Mr. Tran, who fled Vietnam with his parents at age 10, wrote a letter to Mr. Nunez chastising him for personally applauding "a representative of a regime that enslaved and murdered countless thousands of my former countrymen... Mr. Speaker, you have never lived in a land devastated by war."

Vince Duffy, a spokesman for Mr. Nunez, said that any pleasantries extended were part of a normal procedure honoring dignitaries from any country recognized by the United States. "The speaker understands the tragedy of the Vietnam War has produced some very deep veins of emotion, but the fact is that the war ended three decades ago," Mr. Duffy noted.

Mr. Tran isn't satisfied with that explanation. "It wasn't a pro forma recognition," one of Mr. Tran's GOP Assembly colleagues told me. "The Speaker hugged the guy on the floor. Don't tell me the guy from Belarus or Zimbabwe would get that."