I have never been a big fan of Noam Chomsky's, although as a graduate student in philosophy years ago, I had respect for his intellectual prowess in linguistics. But, Chomsky, who professes to be a great democrat and leader of the progressive democratic left has now done something so onerous, that attention must be paid. According to news reports--and this one from the Arabic news station, Al Manar, he paid a love-fest visit to Hezbollah headquarters just a few days ago, where he no doubt felt he was expressing an enemy of my enemy is....sentiment (think Israel, think America), but the fact is that the only powers he hurt by his show of solidarity with the terrorist group were the democrats of the Arab world who are fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where they are also fighting Syrian occupation, and those intellectuals and democrats in Syria who are imprisoned by the regime.

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Tonight the last episode of The West Wing aired, leaving millions of Americans without an alternate reality. While the show lost viewership post-Clinton White House, it also aired some of its best shows this last season. Tonight's final episode marked the changing of the guard from Jeb Bartlett to Matthew Santos, robbing an entire nation of a Jimmy Smits' presidency. Though the Smits candidate apppeared to be a bit of a new Democrat, he could have offered us the type of mirror-world that Martin Sheen's Jeb Bartlett did for years of TV viewing, while we plow through the remainder of the real-life Bush presidency.

If nothing else, this show illustrated how popular culture, smartly rendered, can both mirror a nation and catapult a nation forward as the show promoted a postive role for politics, showing that on good and bad days the White House can be like any back room office--or exalted like no place else on earth.

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