Dept. of corrections

Prof. Chomsky has emailed one of the blog’s proprietors to object to this post. And…I think he has a legitimate complaint, and I made a mistake both to imply more overlap between his positions and Greenwald’s than there is, and a very foolish mistake to take a video presented in edited form by Glenn at face value.

To state my concerns more precisely, I’m still don’t think that even the semi-sardonic praise for Trump was a good way of making his point, and left him open to bad faith quotation from people like Greenwald. Glenn’s line is that Trump, who dramatically escalated drone warfare (remember when Glenn claimed to care about that?) and failed to end the war in Afghanistan remains the true dovish alternative to Biden, who has mostly grounded the drones and ended the Afghanistan war. I don’t really understand anything Trump is saying to support a “diplomatic solution” that the liberal leaders of the West aren’t also doing.

Having said that, to the extent I implied that Chomsky might share Glenn’s view of Trump in general — which I didn’t mean to but it might have come across that way — let me be clear that Chomsky has always been very and admirably consistent in preferring liberalism to fascism despite his critiques of the former and this has been true with both of the elections involving Trump (who, unlike Glenn, he really very much does not support.) With respect to Afghanistan, what he’s advocating is vague, but I agree that I don’t think it would be fair based on the available evidence to suggest that he shares Glenn’s support for the unilateral disarmament of Ukraine, and I retract that part of the last paragraph unreservedly with sincere apologies to Prof. Chomsky.