Pruden on Pinheads.

The Washington Times' Editor Wesley Pruden delivers a verbal beat down to the Sheehaniacs cowering in a ditch deep in the heart of flyover.

Some of the celebrities descending on Prairie Chapel Ranch owe Cindy Sheehan a lot. How else would we know they weren't dead?

Joan Baez, derided in the newspaper comics pages as "Joanie Phony" for her "pacifism" several wars ago, showed up yesterday to sing for the bored folks encamped near George W.'s front gate. Her presence was meant to be a show of solidarity with Cindy Sheehan, but she arrived late for the photo-op. Mrs. Sheehan is currently between engagements in Los Angeles.

Joanie plucked gamely at the strings of her guitar, if not necessarily the heartstrings in the audience, and sang the anthems of the wrinkled unwashed from our most dissolute decade: "Song of Peace" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." She avoided what was arguably her greatest crowd-pleaser, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," an improbable tribute to the Confederacy. She clearly yearns for a reprise of the '60s, when the war in Vietnam gave an exciting social life to the generation drugged on cheap sex and playing at make-believe revolution.

"This is huge," she told the crowd of 200 or so spectators, wilting in the Texas heat and yearning only for a reprise of the air-conditioned comfort back at the motel. "In the first march I went to [during the war in Vietnam] there were 10 of us."

Mzz Baez is the biggest celebrity to show up at the ranch so far, not counting a talk-show hostess from Air America who arrived to audition for the role of the Tokyo Rose for the new century. For her part, Joanie hasn't had a hit in more than a decade, or, as her Internet Web site delicately puts it, she has been "free of any major label associations in the United States."