Alterman on Chomsky

[Bradford DeLong]

>In a message dated 6/18/2002 10:04:02 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
>debsian at pacbell.net writes:
>
>>skeptical of Chomsky. Not in toto. At least not yet. What the 
>>Chomskyites have
>>yet to do or Noam, is to just cut their losses, admit he was wrong to call
>>Faurisson a relatively apolitical French liberal and say that he 
>>knee jerked in
>>assuming that since the NYT, TNR and the Reader's Digest plus the USG was
>>saying that the KR were genocidalists that they must be engaged, in imperial
>>whiterwash apologetics

Which impulse I do understand, and which has trapped me at least 
twice: just because Richard Nixon was lying when he said that Helen 
G. Douglas was under Kremlin discipline doesn't mean he was wrong 
when he said that Alger Hiss spied for Stalin before World War II. 
Just because McCarthy was wrong when he said that George Marshall was 
a communist doesn't mean the McCarthyites were wrong when they said 
Harry Dexter White was one. Yet I've lost arguments trying to defend 
Hiss and White...

Brad DeLong