Specifically, there was a time when no one knew who he was so his pretensions to decency and public activism were plausible. Now he's just the poster child for everything wrong with reflexively attacking on principle anything America (and her allies by association) does. He's the same kind of popular iconoclast who insisted the Soviets were enlightened humanitarians a generation ago, and a generation before that marched behind Pound under the banner of fascism. Against everything but for nothing, because to support anything would be to acknowledge worth in something beside himself.