USEFUL IDIOTS, THEN AND NOW — OR, QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Her book does not contain, alas, the remarkable statement that constituted my own first introduction to a useful idiot. It blazes in my memory across the 58 years since it was uttered. It was 1946. The Cold War was just beginning, and I was listening to a radio debate on the subject between Clare Boothe Luce and Rev. Harry F. Ward, former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union and an ornament of New York’s Union Theological Seminary (professor of Christian ethics there, I believe), who was already famous as an apologist for Communism. Mrs. Luce made a scathing reference to the Soviet Union’s “concentration camps,” to which Dr. Ward promptly responded, “Those are not concentration camps. They are personal rehabilitation camps, and they have done those people a world of good!” It is testimony to the impact that piece of idiocy had on me that I remember every word, and am prepared to bet money that my quotation of it is practically verbatim.

—The late William Rusher’s 2004 review of Mona Charen’s Useful Idiots, headlined, “Will They Ever Learn?”

Flash-forward to today: “Pretty sure they were trying to keep them from jumping:”