Mark Steyn has another great essay today, this time in England's Spectator about Cindy Sheehan. Here's but an excerpt:

Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.

That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

I get many emails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in Sex and the City. The infantilisation of the military promoted by the Left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that ‘of course’ they ‘support our troops’, because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.

On his show today, Hugh Hewitt had Steyn on and said to him:

HH: Let's turn to Crawford, Texas. I have not said much about Cindy Sheehan in the couple of days that I was back on Monday and Tuesday, because I kind of give her the complete pardon, because she's lost her son. But the media vampires surrounding her, Mark Steyn, are utterly without ethic.

MS: Well, I agree with you. I don't even like talking about this, because I think this woman has become unhinged by the terrible thing that has happened to her. We now learn that her mother apparently has had a stroke. She and her husband are divorcing. The family is split up, and you know, she says...her argument is that liberating Iraq, liberating Afghanistan...she opposes the Afghan War, that none of this is worth any American's life. And yet I think you have to ask the other question. Is this insane Bush hatred, and the opportunism that the left has used her for, is that worth destroying her marriage and her family over? I think this woman will look back at these few weeks she's been in the public limelight, in a couple of years time, and feel ashamed of herself, and feel ashamed at the way she allowed herself to be used, and her son's death to be dishonored in this way. I think it's a terrible, terrible thing, but you know, in the end, this war is about bigger things than the death of any individual.

I rarely disagree with Mark Steyn, and hopefully time will prove him right, and myself wrong, but when he says that she'll look back in a couple of years and feel ashamed, I sincerely doubt it. Yesterday, James Taranto compared her Crawford media circus this year to the very similar frenzy spearheaded by Senator Kerry last August during his presidential run. With almost 35 years to ponder his actions whilst still in the Naval Reserves (His The New Soldier book with its upside down flag cover; calling American soldiers war criminals in front of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; throwing away his medals in a Washington protest, etc.), has Kerry ever admitted any sort of remorse? I think for most people, once their emotions drive them to any far-extreme worldview, the rest of their brain compensates by finding an endless amount of ways to justify their actions.

There are certainly exceptions (David Horowitz has written extensively about coming to grips with his involvement in Radical Chic politics in the early 1970s, and in England, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen have both written about leaving the far left), but something tells me she won't be one of them.