The Grieving Activist

Selwyn Duke has a good piece on Cindy Sheehan. He writes:

Being the kind of prop leftist media and activist groups prize – a sympathetic and malleable character whose victim credentials are beyond reproach – such entities have seized upon her story and made her the poster-girl for hate-anything-remotely-conservative-no-matter-what activism. Thus, she has become the latest of a new breed of political animal: the Grieving Activist.

And this:

let’s get something straight: if you want to grieve, grieve. If you want to play politics, play politics.

But my sympathy for the grieving ends where their use of their grief as a political battering ram begins.

I say this unabashedly, without apology or concession. In fact, those who use the Cindy Sheehans of the world for political advantage owe the rest of us an apology. And “use” is the operative word, because this is the most shameful sort of exploitation.