Dear Useful Idiot,

Catherine Seipp:

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.”)

That Zinn’s introduction overshadows anything in Cindy Sheehan’s book underscores what a puppet she is of the more experienced Left. She’s still their most useful symbol of that strange new notion of bleeding-heart entitlement: All citizens (or maybe, these days, all illegal aliens) who disagrees with the president are entitled to have him stop what he’s doing and listen to their complaints individually—especially if they’re parents of soldiers killed fighting in Iraq.
Cindy Sheehan's maudlin narcissism has already been extensively examined, but for those unfamiliar with her philosophy, Dear President Bush is a good primer. “Was it freedom and democracy?” she asks rhetorically about the purpose of her soldier son Casey’s death. “Bulls**t. He died for oil.” This comes a few pages after her solution for problems in the Mideast: “We need to be more fair with policies that way too heavily favor Israel.”

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There is more about this miserable excuse for a mom.