THE USEFUL IDIOT BRIGADE STRIKES AGAIN

Cathy Siepp takes down Cindy Sheehan rather nicely in an aptly titled piece, "Dear Useful Idiot":

My teenage daughter, who is a more sympathetic person than I am, thinks baldly calling Cindy Sheehan an idiot is a bit harsh, so I'll amend: Cindy Sheehan is a useful idiot, a rattle-headed tool of everyone from Not In Our Name, who even as the Twin Towers were still smoldering worried more about retaliation against the poor Taliban than about women oppressed by the Taliban; to pro-Palestinian terrorist apologists; to your friendly neighborhood Stalinists at various branches of International ANSWER, whose objectives range from freeing Mumia to putting a bright and happy spin on daily life in North Korea.

And yet the most idiotic statement in Sheehan’s new book, Dear President Bush, comes not from Sheehan herself but from Howard Zinn, who writes in the introduction: “A box-cutter can bring down a tower. A poem can build up a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution.”

A box-cutter can bring down a tower. By now, I suppose, we should be used to the hard Left’s extending underdog status to the worst of mass murderers; still, the sheer gall of beginning a series of David-and-Goliath metaphors with that one is breathtaking.

So a spunky little box-cutter took on those big old capitalistic towers, the same way that a brave little pamphlet like Dear President Bush takes on Bush and his evil policies. (The publisher is City Lights’s Open Media Series; City Lights is the San Francisco bookstore famously dedicated to free speech, although it won’t carry anything by Oriana Fallaci because she’s “fascist.”)

Go ahead, read it all.

Meanwhile another useful idiot of the left, whose compassion and concern know no bounds has this to say:

"Yes, it [the assasination of Tony Blair by a suicide bomber] would be morally justified. I am not calling for it - but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq - as Blair did."

It is a real love fest among these guys. Cindy adoringly hugging Hugo; Geoge looking deeply into the eyes of Fidel...

Neither Cindy nor George have any problem admiring--or even embracing --dictators and thugs enthusiastically. Welcome to the new, improved Useful Idiot Brigade of the 21st century! Joining the Brigade is easy. Simply set your moral thermostat to zero; your psychological state to denial; and your intellectual state to bankrupt.

UPDATE: The Belmont Club seems to notice the same eerie similarity between Sheehan and Galloway, as they are manipulated by their respective puppet-masters and cheerfully enable and encourage the deaths of innocents all over the world.