1 Though his infamously bogus politics just could be the reason for the success of his infamously bogus linguistics. John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, ... others?

2 No, his linguistics took root before he became well-known as a political blowhard. For the same basic reason: It's an easy path to sounding intelligent without all that troublesome learning and questioning. The practicing linguists I have spoken to - the ones who study languages, instead of just concocting grand theories about them - are invariable thoroughly irritated by Chomsky and his followers. Read the article (or some parts of it; it's quite lengthy) to see why.

3 Perhaps so, but the bogus politics *would* explain the continued fawning adulation of the bogus linguistics. That's the pattern of the other two I mentioned, whose "contributions" in their non-political field would have long been forgotten otherwise. I am sure there are many other examples.

4 As an Anthropology major the study his linguistics was an unavoidable part of the coursework, and it just struck a severe chord of cognitive dissonance with me. Having grown-up and lived overseas for a good while and with some experience learning weird foreign languages (and German) - and having had to undergo various different pedagogic "schemes" by which to do so (some more successful, functional, and sound than others despite various academic praises), his theories and blather just didn't work at all, and I remained totally unconvinced. At a time when we were working towards simplicity and made every effort to avoid over-complexity and jargon, all of his work was replete with it. It was densely layered like a grammatical maze, which I believe was intentional in order to cover his tracks and create confusion - his whole fabric of, “that’s not what I said you said, they said he said” thing was just playing with language logic-structures itself. Anyhow that's how I disremember it, it was a quite while back.