The subject of Noam Chomsky and his credibility has been brought up. Here is the best piece I know of on the subject, a complete intellectual demolition of Chomsky by Australian historian Keith Windschuttle in the New Criterion. Just in case you don't believe Chomsky is completely irresponsible, check out this passage by Windschuttle:

Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist revolution. He urged that “a true social revolution” would transform the masses so they could take power into their own hands and run institutions themselves. His favorite real-life political model was the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

That ought to be all you need to know about Chomsky right there.

Here's a long tirade, mostly about Chomsky's anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi connections in France, by one Werner Cohn, who certainly does dislike Chomsky. Cohn attacks Chomsky from an old-time left-wing and pro-Israeli position.

Here is a 1998 article by Brad DeLong on Chomsky's falsification of alleged facts from alleged sources, and at the bottom it contains a series of links to other pieces denouncing Chomsky's mendaciousness. This is a 2002 article by DeLong on the same subject with new and different information.

This is a David Horowitz all-out assault on Chomsky, written right after 9-11. Horowitz is an American right-wing political activist, a converted Marxist, for those of you who haven't heard of him.

Wanna see Chomsky hang himself with his own words? Here's what Noam broadcast over Radio Hanoi back in the glory days.

And finally, don't miss this crackpot piece claiming that Chomsky is working for the US military and that he's one of the Illuminati. David Icke will be picking up on this pretty soon and will denounce Chomsky as a tool of the reptilian aliens from outer space who control everything. Then where are our leftists going to base their arguments, after Icke's devastating expose on the Chomsky = reptilian connection?

UPDATE: The following specific accusations against Chomsky are made in the Windschuttle and Horowitz articles.

Noam Chomsky:

said the US deserved 9-11 because of the "extreme terrorism" of US foreign policy

praised Mao's China--during the Cultural Revolution

openly supported Vietcong terrorism and called for the same in the Philippines

supported the Khmer Rouge; denied the mass killings in Cambodia; accused his critics on this issue of lying; falsely claimed the Economist as his source

lied about the 1998 attack on the Bin Laden pharmaceutical factory in Sudan; claimed that it resulted in tens of thousands of deaths; lied, saying that Human Rights Watch was one of his sources

believes the media is a mass conspiracy putting out "systematic propaganda"

claimed that the Bosnian Muslims were America's "Balkan clients" while opposing all US efforts to deal with Slobodan Milosevic

still denies that Robert Faurisson, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, is a Nazi

Horowitz's article lays out these pearls of Chomskyan belief:

According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off."

According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included "a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s."

According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads."

According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."

According to Chomsky, America "invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing."

According to Chomsky, "the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust."

In sum, according to Chomsky, "legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."

Noam Chomsky is not a serious intellectual of any sort. His record of supporting totalitarians, of distorting and lying about the facts, of making up sources, of using extremist rhetoric, and of outright paranoia completely discredit him. Nothing he says is to be believed; he's lied and distorted and just made stuff up too often in the past. In addition, he is a morally reprehensible human being.