A POLEMIC. Book Review No. 6 is Mona Charen's Useful Idiots (details or compare prices.) Ms Charen is unlikely to change many minds, and a reprise of Communist sympathies by policy makers and public intellectuals is somewhat dated. All the same, on what would be the 45th occasion of President Reagan's 39th birthday, this quote, from p. 212, seems in order.

For the hard Left, Nicaragua became a hero state as soon as the Sandinistas took power. The usual political pilgrims -- Susan Sontag, William Sloane Coffin, Richard Falk, Pete Seeger, Benjamin Spock, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, and many more hopped the nearest plane to breathe in the invigorating revolutionary air in Managua.

President Reagan's insistence on stopping the spread of Communism in the Caribbean and in Latin America might have angered the Angry Left more than his reference to the Soviet Union as an evil empire.

Note also that many of the individuals named in that passage are also critics of the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq.