Ward Churchill, Moron Extraordinaire

The dude just gets worse and worse.

I’m glad he got fired. Too bad that didn’t give him a wake-up call.

Sigh… The pinheads we will always have with us.

Funny, I remember when he had defenders here, along with Cindy Sheehan. Their nasty personalities and illegitimate arguments alienated nearly all of their allies over time.

Well, when one comes into this thread, let us know.

Even Sheehan lost most of here support around here, AFAICT. And hers is a tragic story. WC’s is not.

How badly will Ward Churchill hurt the Democrats? Only time will tell…

Less than Fred Phelps hurts Christians. He’s by now relegated to the status of Professional Kook by any reasonable standard.

This is why we need to bring back Circus Sideshows.

These people need regular gigs.

In what way?

Churchill’s act is old news. The noteworthy part is this response to a person in the audience who questioned him:

I know there are fanatics abroad who still buy into the Bush/Zionist/Illuminati 9/11 plot scenario, but college students in the U.S.?

I bet I’m going to regret doing this, but okay, here I am as someone who is a Churchill supporter. That’s a bit strong, I don’t see myself as a big fan of his, but if the world were black and white and I needed to pick a side, I’d come down in the pro-Churchill camp. The crux of it is that I believe he was scrutinized only on the basis of his unpopular views of 9/11, and despite his general jerkiness, I feel obligated to support unpopular views of 9/11 because of my support for the expression of unpopular and distasteful opinions in general.

Do you feel that scrutiny was unjustified? Those charges of research misconduct held up pretty well, didn’t they? And complaints about him dated back far earlier than his 9/11 comments, though they were never seriously investigated.

I don’t think anybody feels that he should be silenced. I personally think he’s free to say what he wants. But he doesn’t belong on a college campus at all, except perhaps to continue his own education.

Ah, so you’re equally a Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell supporter?

This is the most retarted statement I have seen recently- And that includes my own!

I’ll be speaking against you at the next Klan rally!

The problem with Churchill is not that what he says is totally false; it’s that it’s couched in such hyperbolic terms that he immediately alienates even most people who would be inclined to agree with him. I mean, if you say that the Zionists wanted Lebensraum, and thought that the Untermenschen needed to get the fuck out of the way or else, he is saying something that is not entirely false, but is couched in extremely inflammatory terms. Ditto with the American Indians–between ‘Manifest Destiny’, the desire for gold and other natural resources on Indian lands, and the occasional desultory attempts to exterminate particular Indian populations (like the smallpox-infected blanket thingy), it is safe to say that the US was guilty of ethnic cleansing too. But it doesn’t really move the debate forward to say that the Americans were just like the Nazis.

I’m hoping that this is merely awkwardly phrased, and what you mean to say is you support the right to express unpopular and distasteful opinions, and not that you think any opinion is worthy of being championed merely because it is unpopular and distasteful. If the latter is true, I’ll have to side with Spit’s characterization of your philosophy as “retarted.”

Also, while you use the term “scrutinized,” I believe one could just as easily say he was “publicized” solely on the basis of his 9/11 comments, a fact which I’m sure has not escaped Churchill’s attention. Like any bored one-year-old, he’s figured out that he gets attention when he misbehaves. A toddler with this aim might reach into his diaper and smear the furniture and walls with his own feces; Mr. Churchill, older and wiser, opts for the rhetorical equivalent.

There was no smallpox-infected blanket thing. No one then had any clue what the germ theory of disease was. It was a total accident from a gift made from the limited resources of the colonists to the Indians, and people around the western world were dying of the same disease from using garments and blankets of those who died.

The link Monty gave didn’t work for me. Can I get a quick “after action report”?

D’oh! Snookered by another urban legend.

You’ll need to argue with Unca Cecil about that: Did whites ever give Native Americans blankets infected with smallpox?

As for Churchill, he makes some good (although obvious) historical points, but expresses them in a way that repulses reasonable people and appeals to wild-eyed extremists.

Ward Churchill, fake Indian. Did he manage to legitimize his ancestry yet? Find a tribe that would claim him as a real member? Yeah, whatever you say, ‘native son’. His entire spiel is hate. Hatred of self, hatred of others; it’s an unending torrent of bile that this nut vomits forth without justification or reason. It’s fantastic to watch his continuing descent into lunacy, and even more amazing to know that there are otherwise rational people that give the man a second’s credibility.