his politics and his rhetoric i would guess (and this is mostly a guess) are indeed less threatening than chomsky's - he drew applause on bill maher's tv show politically incorrect, a few weeks ago, by calling the australian, who won one of the ice-skating championships in the recent olympics, a "loser" (he was analogizing, iirc, bush's election victory to the the australian's gold medal, which the latter won due to a set of accidents that eliminated the front-runners).
--ravi