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Outrageous lie? Listen here you glittering jewel of ignorance, Chomsky is on record defending the Kymer Rouge, and in between anti-American ravings you can find him touting international socialism/communism over the past three decades.

You can admire Chomsky's work as a linguist, but please don't be a useful idiot.

You see, the left, while on track for their will to power, believes that they can bend the truth as long as its useful. There are many in the west that willfully take part in this game of lies. Back in the 1930's the USSR had sympathetic western journalists and intellectuals, like Paul Robeston and members of the NY Times, visit Russia. They were taken to "Potemkin Village", which was basically was fake village where every kulak lived happily. Even the village doctor proclaimed "I have no work because communism has cured all disease!". So these westerners, who knew damn better, took these false stories back to the west. Lenin had a name for these peopel - "useful idiots".

Precisely correct. Chomsky is one of the best sources to read on the pro-Soviet slant of American intellectuals in the Thirties.

I'm beginning to believe you've never even read his work. You reflect the arguments of a few well-known hit pieces against him.

As far as "touting international socialism/communism over the past three decades", that is a very difficult charge to substantiate. I'd say that his writings on Nicaraugua come closest to the mark. But I never read them as a freewheeling endorsement of the former Marxist-leaning government there but more as an indictment of American support of the Contras and the various economic warfare measures we employed. His entire body of work on Central and South America is somewhat problematic but, given the poverty and extreme concentrations of wealth and lack of democratic traditions and tendency of their militaries to establish dictatorships, it's difficult to imagine any realistic model of development that really answers the needs of those countries. I find most of what North American analysts write about Third World development to be little more than a strange fairy tale for domestic consumption.

If you really wish to discuss this subject at length, I would be willing to compare Chomsky to a number of U.S. Secretaries of State, U.N. ambassadors, and U.S. presidents over the past thirty years. We could discuss, for instance, the actual financial and military support they gave to homicidal regimes and the speeches and writings they gave to support regimes that abuse human rights.

Would you care to make the comparison? Chomsky vs. any president since Eisenhower?

I have a great deal of material. You would have, at most, a few paragraphs about the Khmer Rouge to quote out of its original context, perhaps the WSJ articles or perhaps some material from the book by the British author on influential intellectuals in history (of which Chomsky gets short and very dishonest treatment).

You can admire Chomsky's work as a linguist, but please don't be a useful idiot.

Well, there is no doubt he has dominated the field of linguistics for decades, the enfant terrible of linguistic studies. He has a bit of a strange career there too, first convincing everyone of something and then attacking and destroying it. They're all a little afraid of him.