Noam Chomsky

New York Times legal reporter Charlie Savage showed his usual labeling blindness in Friday's piece on strange political bedfellows that oppose indefinite detention: "House to Consider Proposal to Bar Indefinite Detention After Arrests on U.S. Soil."

Savage again showed himself unwilling to label far-left figures like Noam Chomsky as far-left, but has no problem calling the Tea Party "conservative." In the past he has termed the far-left Center for Constitutional Rights "civil libertarians" and "a group of human rights lawyers." Friday he wrote:

On the occasion of Memorial Day, the radical-left Pacifica radio network devoted their hour of "Democracy Now" programming to the soft-spoken radical leftist whack-a-demic Noam Chomsky, who ripped into Ronald Reagan as a singular criminal:

Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also—he also had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on and on, with remarkable consistency.

Now, his grisly record was quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.

Leftwing anarchist Noam Chomsky believes conservative talkers like Rush Limbaugh are blaming America's problems on "rich liberals" in much the same way the Nazis blamed Germany's problems on Jews.

I kid you not.

Speaking in front of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 6, Chomsky told attendees that Americans "who for the last 30 years have seen their wages, income stagnate or decline, their benefits decline, services decline" are being told by "Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, the rest of them" that "rich liberals own everything" and "they don't care about people like you."

To Chomsky, "the memory that comes to my mind...is late Weimar Germany" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Mediaite):