As you may know, Andrew Sullivan is the self-described "conservative" who only seems conservative in one way, he just hates liberals.
Sometime ago I noticed something odd as I watched these two videos almost simultaneously.
* Chomsky: lessons of Cuban Missile Crisis
* Matthews & Andrew Sullivan Clash Over JFK’s Foreign Policy Record On Real Time
Notice the similarity? Chomsky correctly argues that Kennedy was hawkish during the crisis (elsewhere he talked about how terror operations in Cuba were happening as the missile crisis was developing). But Sullivan was just citing how he was a hawk during the election(?) which has nothing to do with the Cuba situation.
So then I found a video of him talking about the economic crisis which is even more perplexing.
In it he admits that wages have stagnated for 30 years so to make up for the lack of wages people bought bad loans so they can sell their homes in the housing bubble, but he goes on to say this is the people's fault?
First it's surprising that Sullivan even admits that wages have been stagnant, something even liberals hesitate to talk about, and that people sold their homes to make up for it (notice Chomsky has said this elsewhere referring it to asset inflation) but why even mention the problem only to blame the victim unless you wanted to just annoy liberals?
In the show he even blurts out saying "the financial crisis does not validate Noam Chomsky, it validates Ron Paul," which again was almost unrelated to the discussion.
Now it's not the first time Sullivan has had a run in with Chomsky, at one point in 2004 he accused of Chomsky of supporting the Soviet Union to which Chomsky replied:
I don’t know if you are aware of how funny the line about my supporting Russia is. Two minutes research would have shown him that I've been strongly anti-Leninist throughout my life, in fact from childhood. He may not know it, but the Kremlin surely did. I was utter anathema there, so much so that my entire professional field [linguistics] was banned. I couldn’t even send technical papers to colleagues and friends in Eastern Europe because it would get them into trouble. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that there were any openings. One of the favorite weeks of my life was in about 1980, when I received two dailies denouncing me furiously for my work on transformational grammar: One was Izvestia, denouncing it as counterrevolutionary, and the other was Argentina’s La Prensa (at the peak of the neo-Nazi military dictatorship), denouncing it as dangerously revolutionary. They’re all basically alike, and Sullivan fits in probably better than he knows.
Evidently since then Sullivan learned the error of his ways and has used Chomsky as a good source to annoy liberals.