[Peace-discuss] Chomsky gets personal about Obama...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[...because of course Obama's politics are entirely conventional.  This 
is from a talk Noam Chomsky gave in Boston and excerpted today on 
Democracy Now. --CGE]


...There's a lot of talk here about how we have a divided country. We 
have to unify. We need a unifier, somebody who will bring it back 
together. Red and blue, and so on. That's pretty marginal. It *is* a 
divided country: it's divided between public opinion and public policy 
-- very sharp divide. And on issue after issue, the whole political 
system is well to the right of the public and public attitudes. And we 
know a lot about these, because it’s a very well studied topic in the 
United States.

...Just to give one last illustration, I was driving home from work the 
other day and torturing myself by listening to NPR. (I have kind of a 
masochistic streak I can’t get over.) Actually, some day I’m going to 
sue them: once they got me so angry that I started speeding; I lost 
control of what I was doing, and I was stopped by a cop, and I was going 
like 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone. Maybe a basis for a civil suit...

But they had a section on Barack Obama, the great new hope. And it was 
very exuberant: what a fantastic personality he is and a great 
candidate, thousands of people coming out. And it went on for about 15 
minutes of excited rhetoric. There's only one thing missing. They didn’t 
say a word about what his policies were on anything. It’s doesn't 
matter, you know. He’s a unifier. He looks at you when he talks to you. 
He’s a really decent guy. Great background. OK, that's an election...

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