The People' s Front

Drifting around and found an interesting critique of Christopher Hitchens criticism of Noam Chomsky which attacked Hitchens for attacking Chomsky and attacked Chomsky at the same time. Very confusing. I started out with Lawyers, Guns and Money and then followed their link to the article attacking Hitchens which also managed to take a swipe at Chomsky. Now these were all by left leaning writers, you under stand and there were some interesting swipes at Chomsky including one poster who suggested that Chomsky was probably no more right in his linguistic theories than he is in his political theories.  I find that an interesting comment since I would expect that it really would be impossible to criticize Chomsky's linguistic theories if one was less than an expert in the area, something the poster never claimed.

I did go to Chomsky's article which seemed to me to raise issues that I am not sure I buy into, but isn't really all that off the wall.  It is short and an easy read.   The gist is if you can drop 80 Navy Seals into a little compound to kill a guy who has in essence no protection then why can't you just capture him and bring him back for trial, since that is what we did with the Nazis.  There is also Chomsky's point (actually more of a suggestion), which is I suspect the thing that really irritated people, that Osama might have just taken credit for someone else's operation and perhaps wasn't the mastermind at all.   Now we all "know" that isn't right, but then it occurs to me that the only reason I know that is because that is what the government and bin Laden told me, and I know for sure that I can't believe one of them and I doubt the other one.

I sincerely doubt that Chomsky is always right, but I know he has been right a lot more than he has been wrong.  So why are these leftist/liberal/progressive types attacking him?  Perhaps he really is a member of the Popular Front for Judea.