Saturday, September 23, 2006
CHAVEZ KILLS CHOMSKY?
According to the New York Times, Venezuelan genius Hugo Chavez is apparently unaware that BushCo’s flesh-mauling killbots have yet to catch up with Noam Chomsky:
At a news conference after his spirited address to the United Nations on Wednesday, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela expressed one regret: not having met that icon of the American left, the linguist Noam Chomsky, before his death.
Hmm. The Times could be mistaken. A Reuters report—man, it’s a real clash of the journalistic superpowers here—claims Chavez in fact referred not to Chomsky but to the very dead John Kenneth Galbraith:
The dark-skinned, mixed race leader told New Yorkers to read Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain as well as modern thinkers like Noam Chomsky and John Kenneth Galbraith, lamenting he could not meet Galbraith before he died in April at age 97.
We await clarification. Meanwhile, those who missed out on a Hugo’s Book Club sales boost are seething:
No one is more bewildered and, frankly, bummed by all of the attention suddenly being paid to Noam Chomsky than Andrew Bacevich.
“I’ve written a few books critical of US foreign policy, too,” said Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. “Why couldn’t Hugo Chavez hold up one of my books?”