First Howard Dean and now Noam Chomsky agreeing with Sarah Palin?

In an interview with Democracy Now, the influential MIT linguistics professor, author, and prominent left-wing political activist admitted that Sarah Palin was right about Barack Obama in that there was no substance to his presidential campaign.

Palin also recently received validation from former Gov. Howard Dean, a prominent liberal Democrat, about what she termed Obamacare death panels, otherwise known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

In these latest comments about the president, Chomsky said that “I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‘hopey changey stuff,’ she was right; there was nothing there. And it was understood by the people who run the political system, and so it’s no great secret that the US electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza… it’s sort of a marketing affair.”

Although Chomsky and Obama would seem to be natural allies at least initially, the professor has previously denounced among other things Obama’s civil liberties record in connection with domestic surveillance and the deployment of lethal drones overseas.

He has also said previously that “I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.”

You might also recall that Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, was subject to widespread scorn after a 2009 Facebook posting about death panels that would ration healthcare treatment.

However, writing in the Wall Street Journal late last month, without mentioning Palin Howard Dean wrote that “One major problem [with Obamacare] is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them. There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting — the essential mechanism of the IPAB — has a 40-year track record of failure … getting rid of the IPAB is something Democrats and Republicans ought to agree on.”

Are you surprised that Sarah Palin is receiving support in her views from those on the opposite end of the political spectrum?