Of all idiots, none is so useful as he who can masquerade as a genius.
MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky recently denounced Hugo Chavez, accusing the Venezuelan strongman of making an "assault" on his nation's democracy and of cruelty with respect to a female judge he imprisoned for issuing an unwelcome ruling. The criticism made headlines, as the "renowned scholar" had long given aid and comfort to Ego-and-Mouth Chavez. In fact, when the leader denounced President Bush in an infamous 2006 U.N. address, it was Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance that he waved and used as a prop. And Chomsky often praises Venezuela's socialist revolution, most recently saying, "It's hard to judge how successful they [the Venezuelan socialists] are, but if they are successful they would be seeds of a better world."
Well, socialism has only failed every time it's been tried, but I guess Chomsky's renowned intellect has finally figured out a way to do the same thing over and over again and achieve different results.
But some people never learn, and in our time they're known as leftists. It's bad enough when a starry-eyed teenager gloms onto a demagogue and then registers surprise when the scorpion acts in accordance with his nature, but it's downright pathetic when an old man behaves as if he has been born yesterday.
And Chomsky, it seems, is continually born again yesterday. In the late 1970s, he defended the Khmer Rouge at the very time that those Cambodian communists were in the midst of a genocidal campaign that ultimately claimed 30 percent of their nation's population. He steadfastly refused to believe reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities, calling them part of a "disinformation" campaign targeting a group that, he said, could usher in not only "national liberation but also ... a new era of economic development and social justice."
Now, understand that the Khmer Rouge weren't "just" genocidal maniacs -- something not unusual in the annals of communism. They formed what was perhaps the most cruel, bizarre, twisted, and incompetent government in modern history. Immediately upon taking power, they initiated their agrarian revolution, ordering the evacuation of Phnom Penh and other major urban centers; they even emptied hospitals and created a situation in which patients had to be pushed through the streets on hospital beds. They abolished the practice of religion; separated families; started history anew with their "Year Zero"; and murdered those showing signs of Western influence, such as the wearing of eyeglasses. And this is just a small sampling of what was a complete rending of every Cambodian tradition and institution (for more, click here).
Of course, Chomsky didn't "know" about this. Oh, if he had actually walked the Cambodian killing fields, stepped over the thousands of human skulls and retched at the smell of rotting flesh -- and, most particularly, if he had found himself in a re-education camp -- he would have "known." But he was too busy rationalizing. After all, he understood the facts of life: Communists are nice, social justice-oriented people. And they were being targeted by the big bad United States, the source of all the world's woes. So it was obvious that all the negative stories about them were Western propaganda. Renowned intellectuals know these things.
Admittedly, today Chomsky acknowledges reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities. He just denies reports of Chomsky Khmer Rouge support. He has his own Year Zero, I suppose, and it started when reality became sufficiently heavy to make rationalization seem like Holocaust denial. Hey, that fellow in 1977 was a different Chomsky. Renowned intellectuals just don't make such mistakes.
Or, they don't learn from them, anyway. And this brings us back to Chomsky on Chavez. Rory Carroll in The Guardian writes:
He [Chomsky]...faulted Chávez for adopting enabling powers to circumvent the national assembly. "Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo [authoritarianism] and it has to be guarded against. Whether it's over too far in that direction in Venezuela I'm not sure, but I think perhaps it is. A trend has developed towards the centralisation of power in the executive which I don't think is a healthy development.
Well, Noam, you let us know when you are sure. We'd like the heads-up.
Then there are Chomsky's comments relating to the persecuted female judge, María Lourdes Afiuni. Carroll writes:
Chomsky said Chávez, who has been in power for 12 years, appeared to have intimidated the judicial system. "I'm sceptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It's striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her ... that suggests an atmosphere of intimidation."
Interestingly, Chomsky was never this measured in his statements condemning the U.S. As with all leftists, the worse his judgments, the more sure of them he is.
The great Roman orator and statesman Cicero once said, "Any man is liable to err; only a fool persists in error." Chomsky exhibits that typical leftist inability to discern good from evil, friend from foe. If he'd been a rabbit, he would have hopped into the fox's lair well before getting so long in the tooth. And if he didn't live in the West's cocoon of safety and comfort, he would ages ago have been swept away in a whirlwind of his own design. He just doesn't learn.
Of course, we all can learn. But it requires that you're humble and sincere enough to admit error (at least to yourself) and are receptive to Truth. It also helps if you realize that, no matter how many people call you a "renowned" intellectual, you're perhaps not all that smart.
Jeffrey, I enjoyed the Chomsky column. Tell me your thoughts on this David Brooks column?
"Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators."
What, by blocking votes, not taxing the rich and obstructionist politics?
However, to be fair, I thought this part was spot on:
"But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.
The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.
The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.
But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol."
But I am not sure how the republicans can be both of these.
However, this is the most telling piece of the article:
"If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right."
Last edited by GoodSpeak; July-5th-2011 at 09:28 PM.
Jeffrey, I enjoyed the Chomsky column. Tell me your thoughts on this David Brooks column?
I read the columns by David Brooks regularly Gordon, as he is the "conservative" op-ed writer for the NYT.
Unfortunately he is often way off the mark, but then again he has to play to the extreme-left audience of the paper.
I ran across this at the Washington Examiner website earlier in the day and I would have to say it hits the nail on the head here
David Brooks loves the imaginary tax deal that exists in his own brain
By: Timothy P. Carney | Senior Political Columnist
07/05/11 10:38 AM
He calls it "The Mother of all No-Brainers." It's a long-term budget deal that New York Times columnist David Brooks says involves reforming unsustainable and insolvent entitlements through cuts, and in exchange, "Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary."
There are many grounds on which to object to this Brooks column (for one, it's hard to take seriously his moralistic talk about conservatives having "no sense of moral decency," especially after he called TARP opponents "nihilists), but the columnist undermines his entire argument with his false premise. In fact, no Democrats are offering entitlement cuts in exchange for eliminating tax credits.
Obama uses imaginary "oil subsidies" and overhyped "corporate jet subsidies" to make it sound like he just wants to eliminate tax credits. But he also makes it clear he wants to raise income tax rates. When you add in the fact that Obama has been multiplying special tax credits like crazy (convert your car to a plug-in car, you get a tax credit!), it becomes harder to believe that Obama really sees tax-credit-elimination talk as a revenue raiser rather than as misleading partisan rhetoric.
Where does Brooks get the idea that Obama simply wants to eliminate special tax breaks? Here's what Obama once wrote:
I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.
This is the best explanation I've seen for Brooks' column.
Noam Chomsky is a has-been blowhard [I'll give you that one, Wozie], but Selwyn Duke...?
Where do you find this stuff?
Woozie is committed to lying and the lies of other right-wing liars.
Selwyn Duke, a former tennis player, is known best of all for insisting that Obama is a Muslim.
But they are both too stupid to lie very well.
The rightwing is on a jihad because Chomsky thinks that since U.S. bombing resulted in the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. should be held partially responsible for the genocide there.
And, of course, the people responsible for bombing Cambodia were not only part of Johnson's administration, but also part of the Republican Richard Nixon administration.
But it was Nixon's decision to carpet bomb Cambodia.
So, add another reason for Woozie to lie about the bombing of Cambodia. Not that Woozie ever needs a reason to lie.
Historians have reported that 2,756,941 tons of ordnance were dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites in Cambodia. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
When Clinton released the history of the bombing of Cambodia in 2000, Chomsky argued that not only was the Khmer Rouge guilty of genocide, but the U.S. was as well.
Yeah, but Chomsky's genocide point is way off base.
In a previous tirade, there was absolutely no comparison to be made with his claims of the slaughter of Native Americans as his "evidence" of geocidal invaders relative to the Middle East. Like I said in another post, this would be comparable to calling Americans slave owner invaders simply upon the basis of 200 year old history.
Chomsky is a has-been blowhard with a tenuous grip on reality; everthing is genocide to this guy. He seriously needs to fade into obscurity, IMHO.
Last edited by GoodSpeak; July-5th-2011 at 09:55 PM.
I read the columns by David Brooks regularly Gordon, as he is the "conservative" op-ed writer for the NYT.
Unfortunately he is often way off the mark, but then again he has to play to the extreme-left audience of the paper.
I ran across this at the Washington Examiner website earlier in the day and I would have to say it hits the nail on the head here
David Brooks loves the imaginary tax deal that exists in his own brain
By: Timothy P. Carney | Senior Political Columnist
07/05/11 10:38 AM
He calls it "The Mother of all No-Brainers." It's a long-term budget deal that New York Times columnist David Brooks says involves reforming unsustainable and insolvent entitlements through cuts, and in exchange, "Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary."
There are many grounds on which to object to this Brooks column (for one, it's hard to take seriously his moralistic talk about conservatives having "no sense of moral decency," especially after he called TARP opponents "nihilists), but the columnist undermines his entire argument with his false premise. In fact, no Democrats are offering entitlement cuts in exchange for eliminating tax credits.
Obama uses imaginary "oil subsidies" and overhyped "corporate jet subsidies" to make it sound like he just wants to eliminate tax credits. But he also makes it clear he wants to raise income tax rates. When you add in the fact that Obama has been multiplying special tax credits like crazy (convert your car to a plug-in car, you get a tax credit!), it becomes harder to believe that Obama really sees tax-credit-elimination talk as a revenue raiser rather than as misleading partisan rhetoric.
Where does Brooks get the idea that Obama simply wants to eliminate special tax breaks? Here's what Obama once wrote:
This is the best explanation I've seen for Brooks' column.
Yeah, but Chomsky's genocide point is way off base.
There is absolutely no comparison to be made here especially when he claims the slaughter of Native Americans as his "evidence". Like I said in another post, this would be comparable to calling Americans slaver owners simply upon the basis of 200 year old history.
Chomsky is a has-been blowhard with a tenuous grip on reality and needs to fade into obscurity, IMHO.
Where does he mention Native Americans?
He says this:
"i'ts pretty hard to disagree with analysts like Ben Kiernan … who released the documentation during the Clinton years – their conclusion was that this bombing, which really had genocidal intent –anything that flies against anything that moves – essentially changed the KR from a small group into a mass army of what they call enraged peasants bent on revenge. How could you omit that when you are discussing the Khmer Rouge atrocities?"
Chomsky makes the reasonable point that carpet bombing indiscriminately is essentially genocide, and it led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
But that is why both Republicans and Democrats, such as yourself, hate Chomsky, because both Republicans and Democrats were behind the bombing of Cambodia.
It seems that only extremists on the left (the tin-foil hat crowd that doesn't know any better) think anything of this chimp known as Chomsky
Stefan Kanfer
America’s Dumbest Intellectual
Summer 2002
Walk onto the popular-music floor of Virgin Records in midtown Manhattan, and you encounter, as you’d expect, kids with shoulder tattoos and pierced body parts, wandering through rows of the latest hip-hop, altrock, and heavy-metal CDs as heavily amplified beats thunder. At the checkout counter, though, is a surprise. A single book is on display: perennial radical Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed, 9/11—an impulse item for the in-your-face slackers of the Third Millennium. Strictly speaking, 9/11 is a non-book, a hastily assembled collection of fawning interviews with Chomsky conducted after the terrorist attack on New York City and the country, in which the author pins the blame for the atrocities on—you guessed it—the U.S. But you’d be wrong to dismiss 9/11 as an inconsequential paperback quickie. More than 115,000 copies of the book are now in print. It has shown up on the Boston Globe and the Washington Post best-seller lists, and in Canada, it has rocketed to seventh on the best-seller list. And as its prominent display at Virgin Records attests, 9/11 is particularly popular with younger readers; the book is a hot item at campus bookstores nationwide. The striking success of 9/11 makes Chomsky’s America-bashing notable, or at least notably deplorable—especially here in New York, which lost so many of its bravest on that horrible day.
Chomsky’s title for his new book may have a little to do with its best-seller status: some people may have picked it up assuming it to be a newsworthy account of September 11. But undoubtedly, the main reason 9/11 is selling so briskly is because of its author’s fame. According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is cited more than any other living author—and he shows up eighth on the all-time most-cited list, the paper says, right after Sigmund Freud. Do a search for “Noam Chomsky” on Amazon.com and up pops an astonishing 224 books. The New York Times calls him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” He’s even been the subject of an adoring 1993 movie-length documentary film. Chomsky has achieved rock-star status among the young and hip. Rock groups like Bad Religion and Pearl Jam proudly quote his writings in interviews and in their music. To the self-styled bohemian coffee-house crowd, observes Wired magazine, “Chomsky is somewhere between Kerouac and Nietzsche—carrying around one of his books is automatic countercultural cachet.”
Chomsky, now a 73-year-old grandfather living in suburban Massachusetts, has worked for decades to win that cachet. Avram Noam was born in Philadelphia in 1928. His parents, William and Elsie Chomsky, had fled from czarist oppression in Russia to the City of Brotherly Love, where William established himself as a Hebrew scholar and grammarian. Radical politics aroused the young Noam—at ten, he wrote a school newspaper editorial on the Spanish Civil War, lamenting the rise of fascism, and two years later he embraced the anarchism that he still adheres to today. By the age of 16, the bright, ambitious youth had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. Passed over for a teaching position at Harvard, he landed in 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has remained ever since.
Most linguistics professors would have toiled in obscurity in a science-and-industry school like MIT. Not Chomsky. In the 1950s, he brashly challenged psychologist B. F. Skinner’s theory of language as a learned skill, acquired by children in a process of reward and punishment. Chomsky claimed instead that when we learn a language as children, we can articulate and understand all sorts of sentences that we’ve never actually come across before. “What we ‘know,’ therefore,” Chomsky held, “must be something deeper—a grammar—that makes an infinite variety of sentences possible.” In Chomsky’s view, the capacity to master the structures of grammar is genetically determined, a product of our evolutionary development. This idea—that grammar is hardwired in the labyrinth of DNA—shook the walls of linguistics departments across the globe. Chomsky promoted his theory tirelessly, defending it in countless symposia and scholarly reviews. By the mid-sixties, he was an academic superstar; in the seventies, researchers at Columbia University even named a chimpanzee trained to learn 125 words “Nim Chimpsky” in his honor.
With this fame as a base, the professor proceeded to wander far from his area of expertise. Such uses of fame, ironically, are common in the country Chomsky attacks so relentlessly. In America, you come across two kinds of fame: vertical and horizontal. The vertical celebrity owes his renown to one thing—Luciano Pavarotti, for example, is famous for his singing, period. The horizontal celebrity, conversely, merchandises his fame by convincing the public that his mastery of one field is transferable to another. Thus singers Barbra Streisand and Bono give speeches on public policy; thus linguistics professor Chomsky poses as an expert on geopolitics.
Chomsky first employed his horizontal celebrity during the 1960s, when he spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War. His 1969 collection of agitated writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, indicted the nation’s brainwashed “elites”—read: government bureaucrats and intellectuals who disagreed with him on the morality of the war. But Vietnam was only the beginning: over the next three decades, Chomsky published a steady stream of political books and pamphlets boasting titles like What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies—all of them filled with heated attacks on American policies, domestic and foreign.
Those attacks would be laughable if some people didn’t take them seriously. Here’s a small but representative sample. The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”
Goodness. But if America is all about ignoring hungry children, why does the country spend billions in public and private funds every year on the poor? Does America deliberately seek to mis-educate and send to prison a “superfluous” population? Wouldn’t today’s knowledge-based economy benefit from as many decently educated people as it could find? What Third World countries does Chomsky have in mind where the discussion is more freewheeling and open than in the U.S.? Algeria? Cuba? Such puerile leftism is scarcely worthy of a college sophomore.
If possible, however, Chomsky’s assessment of U.S. foreign policy is even more absurd. The nightmare of American evil began in 1812, he thinks, when the U.S. instigated a process that “annihilated the indigenous [American] population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.” That the U.S. saved the Philippines during World War II, that Hawaiians voted to become the fiftieth state, that every day Mexicans pour across the border to take part in the economy of the hated United States—all of that is irrelevant to Chomsky. He believes in the Beaumarchais mode of political debate: “Vilify, vilify, some of it will always stick.”
For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most, the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.
The Chomskian rage hasn’t confined itself to his native land. He has long nourished a special contempt for Israel, lone outpost of Western ideals in the Middle East. The hatred has been so intense that Zionists have called him a self-hating Jew. This is an unfair label. Clearly, Chomsky has no deficit in the self-love department, and his ability to stir up antagonism makes him even more pleased with himself. No doubt that was why he wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler’s death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank’s diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” and claimed that they grew out of “extensive historical research.” But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his “argument.” Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: “I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust.”
Just recently, Chomsky spearheaded a group pressuring universities to divest themselves of any stock connected with the Jewish state: Israel equals South Africa in the Chomskian universe of moral equivalence. Here, happily, Chomsky got nowhere. He obtained 400 signatures for his movement; opposing him, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, gathered 4,000 signatures in support of Israel. The controversy set Dershowitz off again. This time, he said, he wanted the MIT prof to debate him “on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself—and the world—against terrorism that targets civilians.” He pointed out that universities have always invested in companies head-quartered in foreign nations with unsavory reputations—countries whose citizens don’t have the freedom the Israelis enjoy or suffer the terror they endure. “Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple.” Chomsky declined the challenge.
That brings us to 9/11, an egregious insult to decency in general and to the citizens of New York in particular. True to form, in one of the interviews, Chomsky calls the United States “a leading terrorist state” and equates President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11. In every way, Chomsky’s comparison is obscene. The bombing was in response to attacks on two U.S. embassies that had resulted in the deaths and injuries of thousands. The U.S. made sure it took place at night, when the target was empty of civilians. U.S. intelligence, mistaken though it may have been, indicated that the pharmaceutical factory was producing weapons of mass destruction. The unprovoked attack on the World Trade Center, needless to say to anyone except Chomsky and his disciples, occurred in broad daylight, with the intention of inflicting maximum damage and death on innocents.
Chomsky concedes that the WTC attack was unfortunate—not so much because of the deaths of Americans, but because “the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.” (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, must have been dancing in the streets that day.) Israel, he adds, “is openly exulting in the ‘window of opportunity’ it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity.”
On the rare occasions in 9/11 when Chomsky expresses condolences for the victims of the terrorist attack, he immediately goes on to excoriate the U.S. “The atrocities were passionately deplored, even in places where people have been ground underfoot by Washington’s boots for a long, long time,” he typically says. Chomsky rolls on in this manner. The West is the Great Satan, the Third World its eternal victim. The World Trade Towers were a symbol of America’s gluttony and power. In effect, we were asking for it and are now unjustly using it as a casus belli. More U.S. oppression is about to take place all over the globe. If you didn’t know better, you could be reading one of bin Ladin’s diatribes. Chomsky’s response to September 11 outraged even leftist Christopher Hitchens, a former admirer of the MIT professor who now attacked him for abandoning “every standard that makes moral and intellectual discrimination possible.”
Does anyone believe these inanities? It would be tempting to say that the author only preaches to the choir. But there’s more to Chomsky’s success than that. True, Chomsky is like the Bog Man of Grauballe, Denmark, preserved unchanged for centuries. Since the early 1960s, no new ideas have made it into his oeuvre. He is as he was, and his rage against democracy as practiced in the U.S. is of a piece with the raised fists of the Chicago Seven and the ancient bumper stickers condemning “Amerika.” But his message still seems to resonate with a sizable faction of the Boomers, trained to respond to emotion rather than reason. These are the people who sympathized with Susan Sontag’s notorious post–September 11 observation: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” These are the folks who applauded Bill Clinton’s fatuous mea culpa appraisal of the WTC attack: “This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human. . . . [W]e are still paying a price today.”
And now a younger crowd is following the Pied Piper of anti-Americanism. 9/11 makes it easy for them. They needn’t read it; they just have to make sure the thing is sticking out of their backpacks or sitting on their milk-crate coffee tables, a symbol of mass-market rebellion pushed at the record stores for $10.95—less than the new Eminem CD! Call it Anti-Americanism for Dummies. It would be more than a pity if the lies of 9/11 seduced more innocents; it would be a clear and present danger. We are at war now, and two generations of Chimpskies are enough.
It always astonishes me that right wingers, who hate the current American president so much that they are committed to his failure -- and the failure of America's economic recovery as long as a Democrat is president -- suddenly become "patriots" when it comes to people like Chomsky who rightly call out Republican frauds, cheats, liars and murderers.
Wow. Chomsky is "anti-American." But no more anti-American than the "Christian Republicans" who pray for the failure of Obama.
Stefan Kanfer, by the way, is yet another butt-boy for billionaires, the billionaires like Bruce Kovner, who fund the Manhattan Institute, which employs Kanfer.
Dumbass Wozniak lets yet another right-wing billionaire do his thinking.
Last edited by rollhead; July-5th-2011 at 10:44 PM.
How the woozies' media hero violates the liberty of citizens
UK phone hacking targets more slain schoolgirls
By GREGORY KATZ, Associated Press – 52 minutes ago
LONDON (AP) — Britain's tabloid phone hacking scandal dominated the airways Wednesday as it swelled to allegedly involve more missing schoolgirls and the families of London terror victims. Lawmakers held an emergency debate, companies hastily pulled their ads and the prime minister demanded two new inquiries.
News International, the British linchpin of Rupert Murdoch's global News Corp. media empire, was under intense pressure due to its News of the World tabloid, which has admitted hacking into the phones of celebrities but now stands accused of possibly interfering with police investigations into missing girls who were found murdered.
The News of the World had reportedly hacked into the cell phone of missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002, deleting messages and giving her parents and police false hope that the girl was still alive.
Milly had been abducted and murdered, and the search for her transfixed Britain at the time.
Prime Minister David Cameron called for inquiries into the News of the World's behavior as well as into the failure of the original police inquiry to uncover the latest allegations now emerging.
London's Metropolitan Police, meanwhile, confirmed they were investigating evidence from News International that some officers illegally accepted payments from its tabloid in return for information.
"It is absolutely disgusting what has taken place," Cameron said, speaking in the House of Commons shortly before an emergency debate opened Wednesday. He said the scandal had entered a new phase now that it included murder and possibly terror victims, but added any inquiry into the News of the World would have to wait until the police investigation was concluded.
The hacking case broadened with revelations that the tabloid's operatives are also suspected of hacking into the phones of victims of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks on London's transit system that killed 52 people.
Graham Foulkes, father of one of the 2005 victims, said police told him he was on a list of names of potential hacking victims.
"I just felt stunned and horrified," Foulkes told The Associated Press. "I find it hard to believe someone could be so wicked and so evil, and that someone could work for an organization that even today is trying to defend what they see as normal practices."
Foulkes, who plans to mourn his son on Thursday's anniversary of the attack, said a completely independent investigation is needed because new information that surfaced Wednesday shows the police were compromised by accepting "bribes" from the tabloid.
"The police are now implicated," he said. "The prime minister must have an independent inquiry and all concerned should be prosecuted."
Foulkes said Rebekah Brooks, the one-time News of the World editor who is now chief executive of News International, must resign immediately. Brooks has said she didn't know about the hacking and will remain in charge.
"She's gotta go," Foulkes said. "She cannot say, oops, sorry, we've been caught out. Of course she's responsible for the ethos and practices of her department. Her position is untenable."
Foulkes said he wants to meet Murdoch in person about the scandal. Simon Greenberg, News International's director of corporate affairs, told the BBC that a meeting was "something we would consider."
"I doubt he's brave enough to face me," said Foulkes.
Several companies hastily pulled ads from the News of the World amid the public disgust.
Virgin Holidays canceled several ads due to run in the Sunday newspaper this week. Car makers Ford UK and Vauxhall and Halifax bank also said they have suspended advertising in the tabloid.
Bloggers have urged advertisers to boycott the News of the World and all other media outlets of its owners. Mumsnet — a popular online community for mothers — on Tuesday removed ads from broadcaster Sky after its members complained.
U.K. tabloids have a history of harassing royals, sports stars and celebrities, eavesdropping and paying even the most tangential sources for information about stars' sex lives and drug problems. But the Dowler allegations amounted to interfering in a police investigation to seek tabloid headlines.
British media also reported that the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, schoolgirls murdered in a sensational 2002 case, had been informed by police that they were investigating whether the News of the World also hacked their telephones.
Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective employed by News of the World, and former News of the World reporter Clive Goodman have already served prison sentences for hacking into the phones of royal officials. Mulcaire issued an apology Tuesday to anyone who had been hurt by his actions, but said there was no intention of interfering with a police investigation.
"Working for the News of the World was never easy. There was relentless pressure. There was a constant demand for results," Mulcaire said.
The intense attention on the News of the World comes at a sensitive moment for Murdoch, who is seeking British government clearance to launch a full, multibillion-pound takeover of British Sky Broadcasting.
Britain's Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has insisted he will decide the issue purely on competition grounds, without regard to the behavior of the News of the World. But some members of Parliament are linking the two issues and demanding that Hunt block a takeover.
Cameron on Wednesday again rejected calls to refer — and thus delay — any BSkyB takeover by referring the issue to the Competition Commission. Cameron and his wife are friends with Brooks, the News International chief.
The rapidly expanding phone hacking case is also an embarrassment for London's Metropolitan Police, who essentially accepted the paper's claim that Mulcaire and Goodman were simply rogue employees whose actions did not reflect company policy.
Danica Kirka and Meera Selva in London contributed to this report.
He's just responding to the "invisible hand of the marketplace", providing a product in a "supply and demand environment" under "free market principles". Why can't you see his true genius?
Face it. We live in two nations, sharply divided by an enormous economic chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. This should be an obvious fact of life for most Americans. Just read the story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Profits Thrive in Weak Recovery.” Or the recent New York Times story pointing out “that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million,” a 23 percent gain over the year before.
In the midst of a jobless recovery, those same corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in reserves, refusing to invest in this country, as increasing percentages of their profits are garnered in tax-sheltered operations abroad. And the bankers who caused the economic meltdown have turned against President Barack Obama, who saved them; instead they favor a tea-party-dominated Republican Party that seeks to limit any restraint on corporate greed while destroying the ability of state and federal governments to bring some measure of relief to ordinary folk.
The whole point of the tea party is to focus concern over our stagnant economy on something called “big government” while ignoring the big corporations that have bought the government as an accessory to their marketing strategies. Big government is big precisely because it now exists primarily to make the world safe for multinational capitalism, whether through a bloated defense budget, trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or monetary policies that serve the interests of the largest companies.
It was their lobbyists who got Congress to end sensible regulations of financial shenanigans, and now, with the new tea party members of Congress as their most stalwart allies, they are yanking the teeth from the very mild regulations that Obama got through the last Congress. As The Associated Press reported: “Congressional Republicans are greeting the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s financial overhaul law by trying to weaken it, nibble by nibble.”
It is nothing short of demagogic for the Republicans to be complaining about the debt when it was the radical deregulatory policies that they pursued which caused all that governmental red ink in the first place. What a hoax to pretend that teachers’ pensions or environmental protections are responsible for a debt that increased by 50 percent as a direct consequence of the banking collapse. Yet they want to gut even the tepid regulations that became law under the Obama administration, foaming at the mouth about sensible regulation as job killing when it is the uncontrolled greed of Wall Street that is at the root of our high unemployment.
Congressional Republicans are cutting funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as if those already underfunded agencies are centers of anti-business radicalism. The CFTC is run by former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler, who, back when he was in the Clinton Treasury Department serving under another onetime Goldman leader, Robert Rubin, teamed up with Republicans in Congress to gut financial regulation. He is one of the Obama regulators who has managed to delay even the minor controls that the Dodd-Frank law requires for the still wildly out-of-control $600 trillion derivatives market.
What a joke that the tea party assertion that radicals have taken over the Obama government is embraced even by lobbyists for Goldman Sachs, whose former executives have populated the Obama administration as widely as they did the two previous administrations. All they are missing this time around is that they didn’t get to have one of their own named as treasury secretary, as was the case in both the Clinton and Bush cabinets.
This week, the Los Angeles Times reported on Goldman’s renewed lobbying efforts in Washington aimed at watering down what remains of the promise of Dodd-Frank. True to Washington tradition, Goldman has hired Michael Paese, a former top staffer for the “liberal” Rep. Barney Frank to head its Washington operation, which last year spent $4.6 million lobbying Congress to soften the bill, a task now made far easier with Goldman’s tea party allies in the new Republican-dominated House. As the Times noted, “Goldman has spent much of its money on hired guns from major Washington lobbying firms, including former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).”
Between the faux populism of the tea party and the army of sellout ex-congressional staffers and politicians from both parties, the Washington fix is in. Short of hitting it big on a lottery ticket, the vast majority of Americans are sentenced to a future of lowered expectations, insurmountable personal debt and dismal job prospects.
They may not know it, however, thanks to the constant propaganda from a corporate culture dominated by images of a classless nation in which all consume the delights of the American dream, from the perfect smartphone to the perfect pill for bladder control, while merrily hacking away on the perfectly manicured golf course of one’s fantasies.
The American people have declared in poll after poll after poll that they think the deficit should be addressed through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes. Yet Republicans are simply refusing to entertain the possibility of any revenue increases of any kind
The notion that the wealthy should sacrifice anything at all in the way of higher taxes or revenues is now such a nonstarter that Dems are finding themselves forced to hold a vote on the general concept that the rich should contribute something “meaningful” to deficit reduction.
This is insane.
Senator Debbie Stabenow, a prime mover of this initiative, sends over this comment:
“The differences in this debate could not be clearer. Republicans want to end Medicare and target the middle class while protecting millionaires and billionaires. We are focused on cutting wasteful spending and ending special treatment for the wealthy elite and the well-connected. That’s what this debate is all about.”
He says this:
"i'ts pretty hard to disagree with analysts like Ben Kiernan … who released the documentation during the Clinton years – their conclusion was that this bombing, which really had genocidal intent –anything that flies against anything that moves – essentially changed the KR from a small group into a mass army of what they call enraged peasants bent on revenge. How could you omit that when you are discussing the Khmer Rouge atrocities?"
Chomsky makes the reasonable point that carpet bombing indiscriminately is essentially genocide, and it led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
But that is why both Republicans and Democrats, such as yourself, hate Chomsky, because both Republicans and Democrats were behind the bombing of Cambodia.
I was referring to a recent rant about US involvement in the middle East.
I don't hate him. I just don't think he has anything to say of any real value. Besides, he's a linguist.
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Originally Posted by Gordon B
