That last sentence is too optimistic. I like Krugman, and I think he's changed since the late 90's. But in general I expect a fair number of center lefties to happily throw the far left overboard if they ever get back into power, and maybe they will, if enough centrists and moderate conservatives pull back from the Republicans.

This is related--Somerby over at the Daily Howler is a classic centrist liberal who's been furious for many years about how the MSM started bashing centrist liberals (notably Al Gore) beginning in the 90's.

Today he notices that Naomi Klein gets the same sort of treatment. I've known for years that Somerby and Chomsky were talking about the same phenomenon--just looking at different examples. Somerby seems to be waking up to this.

Maybe the center lefties and the

Not only will they be happy to turn on the DFH, but they will likely use the misquotation technique to gin up an example and say that people on the Left have been doing this to them for years but they never expected the serious people on the right to do the same thing. Oh, the vapor, the vapor!

I remember being amazed upon entering the blogworld and seeing how many prominent liberal bloggers claimed to know nothing of Chomsky, having never read his work at all. I thought, Really? You all, being reasonably intelliegent people with an interest in the wider world and how it's run, never heard of this guy or thought to look through one of his books?

Then I remember people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias openly admitting that part of their support for the Iraq war was based in an emotional aversion to all the DFH's on their campuses and their "facile" quoting of Noam, and I was severely depressed.

Now I see some of them alighting on some of the most banal Chomskyisms as if they're brand-spanking new ideas. And so it goes.

I've met Krugman. He's a nice guy, but he's really a centrist. I cannot imagine either he or Fallows throwing their lots in with the DFH contingent.

I think that it could be a very radicalizing experience to read the slanderous things which are written about NC, and then to follow them up. Simply follow them up. NC has ties to/is sympathetic to neo-nazis? NC denies Cambodian atrocities? And so on and so forth. You see the mud which is slung in his direction, & you start to realize that it is done because NC has absolutely devastating arguments, that he has read more than almost anybody else discussing US foreign policy, that he is clear, and absolutely consistent in his support for human rights & democracy.

He is also absolutely effective in finding the kernels of truth & meaning amongst the husk which surrounds them. Some time ago I heard him quote a TNR editorial from 2 Apr. 1984 on elections in El Salvador to the effect that the US has more important priorities than Salvadorean human rights, "and that military
aid must go forth regardless of how many are murdered". Surely this is taken out of context? And in a way, it is. It is surrounded by a lot of garbage, but this quote is probably the most salient bit in the piece. It is one of the only statements that has any meaning. And it is absolute barbarism.

i went to the krugman's book tour event in washington dc tonight - it was presented by the politics & prose bookstore at temple sinai - krugman was in conversation with the washpost's e j dionne

it fell to a member of the audience, during the question period, to mention the four letter word, "the elephant in the room" as the questioner said - iraq

krugman said, "i'm very disappointed with the democrats" - many in the audience applauded

then he and e.j. said - gee, too bad, what is to be done, just the way it goes - presumably the next president will end the war soon after she takes office

the other four letter word, nearly the same, did not come up at all

meanwhile, let's look on the bright side, krugman invited us - at the beginning of bush's second term, he wanted to abolish social security - now it looks like we'll have a an approximation to universal health insurance by the end of the next president's first term

summary - "the future's so bright, i gotta wear shades"

as far as i could tell, krugman wasn't faking it, trying to keep the kids cheerful because we can't get out of the railroad cars until we get to the end of the line anyway --

it seems he really is optimistic - and thinks the military-industrial-congression-financial complex is gonna let the pendulum swing back again

dionne brought the event to a close by reading us the last paragraph of krugman's book - "democracy is a warm fuzzy" or words to that effect

if krugman and dionne are the brightest minds of our generation, liberal-public-intellectual-wise, then i have to revise my opinions on the mix of cluelessness/cowardice/corruption in our elected officals towards the "clueless" end

this effort to enlighten all potentially sentient beings, however long it takes, is not going as fast as i had hoped

Erik--you're describing how I moved from center-left to much further left. I started reading one of Chomsky's books "The Political Economy of Human Rights vol II. I wanted to see what this notorious Khmer Rouge apologist would say in the Cambodia chapter, so I stood in the bookstore aisle and started reading. (Noam would say he took no stance at all on the extent of the atrocities at that time, not knowing enough, but there's evidence that he did lean towards underestimating the scale, evidence that is never ever cited by Noam-haters, because it shows he was being principled. I mean the fact that he condemned the North Vietnamese invasion at the end of the Cambodia chapter, and retracted this criticism years later when he said it was one of the few humanitarian interventions on record. By that time he knew the Pol Pot regime had been engaged in genocide.)

Anyway, I decided Noam wasn't perfect, but he also wasn't close to the monster I'd always seen described in mainstream publications. I could tell this just from reading a page or two of the book. How odd to find this alleged apologist for Pol Pot talking about substantial and gruesome atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. And yeah, this alone was radicalizing. It was obvious people didn't want to deal with what he said, so they made things up about his positions and attacked that instead.

Nowadays, with blogs, shrill center and far leftists alike, there's no single target that can be taken as representative of an entire point of view, so what the MSM does instead is try to discredit the blogosphere.

I lent Year 501 to a 'fellow traveler' at work.On the way back to me,it fell into the hands of a bright,but conventionally educated and informed third person who was prepared to dislike it.
He's now a Chomsky acolyte.I mentioned he was bright.
Krugman was on Democracy Now last week.I don't get the sense he's deserting us any time soon.

Thanks for the story, Donald. Good to know that my guess wasn't off the mark.

It gives me warm fuzzies to read these little "encounters with Noam" as they largely mirror my own. Conventional (and collegiate--the worst kind) liberal turned some sort of leftist, thanks to Chomsky (in my case, American Power and the New Mandarins), with an assist by Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes.