Speaking of clocks, Todd also referred to the Chomsky types as "broken clocks that are correct twice a day".
Todds' got a point there. 'Old Republican' cranks...
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I don't want to come off as a reactionary Chomsky groupie but I've got to say that I see zero evidence of a romantic look back at 'Republican glory' in any of the man's published words. Vidal yes, but Chomsky?
Indeed, in what is probably the most comprehensive treatment of the topic of America's history from his point of view, the book "Year 501", we are introduced to early, post colonial America this way:
Excerpted from chapter two, "Felling Trees and Indians"
After the colonies gained their independence in the course of the great international conflict that pitted England against France, Spain, and Holland, state power was used to protect domestic industry, foster agricultural production, manipulate trade, monopolize raw materials, and take the land from its inhabitants. Americans "concentrated on the task of felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries," as diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey described the project in 1969.27
These tasks, and the rhetorical accompaniment, have been eminently reasonable by reigning standards of Political Correctness; the challenge to them in the past few years has, not surprisingly, elicited much outrage among guardians of doctrinal purity. Hugo Grotius, a leading 17th century humanist and the founder of modern international law, determined that the "most just war is against savage beasts, the next against men who are like beasts." George Washington wrote in 1783 that "the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape." What is called in official PC rhetoric "a pragmatist," Washington regarded purchase of Indian lands (typically, by fraud and threat) as a more cost-effective tactic than violence. Thomas Jefferson predicted to John Adams that the "backward" tribes at the borders "will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains"; the same would be true of Canada after the conquest he envisioned, while all blacks would be removed to Africa or the Caribbean, leaving the country without "blot or mixture." A year after the Monroe Doctrine, the President called for helping the Indians "to surmount all their prejudices in favor of the soil of their nativity," so that "we become in reality their benefactors" by transferring them West. When consent was not given, they were forcibly removed. Consciences were eased further by the legal doctrine devised by Chief Justice John Marshall: "discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian right of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest"; "that law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to...the tribes of Indians, ...fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest."
<end excerpt>
Now either the Professor expressed, prior to writing these words, a passionate love of yeoman farmers, Jeffersonian ideas and plucky individualism and then, after perhaps experiencing a Saul-to-Paul like epiphany, changed entirely or, this scathing critique of the American project - from its beginning - has been his consistent position.
DRM
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