[Alex63]

When you say "The fact that he's also anti-government is new", I have to assume you mean the fact that he's opposed to the current administration, as Chomsky's opposition to the US government in general is long standing.

In my eyes, the article reads largely as a hagiography. The only "news" I see in it is that Chomsky compares the current situation in the US to the Weimar Republic. I am not an expert on either pre-WWII Germany, or modern US politics, but it seems contradictory to me to compare the US today with the effectively powerless Weimar government while simultaneously decrying the US as the most powerful government in the world. While there may be some parallels in terms of public attitudes, to me this seems like a more literate example of Godwin's Law (except not on Usenet).

You mention that Wikipedia states that "According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source." This seems like an argument to authority. It occurs to me that the period chosen ('80 - '92) corresponds to the Reagan and Bush administrations, and that these citations may therefore reflect the amount of discourse among administration opponents as much as they reflect Chomsky's intellectual stature.

To be clear, I would be just as unhappy about someone posting an article on HN reporting that Pat Robertson thinks that the Obama administration is massing troops in Cuba for a "socialist" overthrow of the US government. That would be "thought provoking" too. Of course, the bias among HN reviewers (and comments) makes this pretty unlikely. My own preference would be that political stories on HN have at least some technology angle, and a modicum of reporting, rather than just editorializing (for example, the recent stories about Wikileaks have both).