I don’t know what other people see or read of Phelps, but I’ve seen only brief blurbs about him and his church in the mainstream press, though there have been innumerable threads about him here. Obviously the left’s work in this regard lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.
And there’s a big difference in motive too. Few if any lefties here suggest that Phelps is representative of fundies. But the whole point of the right’s chronic publicizing of Ward Churchill is to suggest that he’s not atypical of the left.
I gather the fact that you were not convinced is the entirety of your rebuttal.
Did you not see that the article is from the UC Davis Newspaper? I would hardly call that a bullhorn for the right.
I have never suggested that Churchill is typical of anything.
I have seen commentary trying to connect Phelps to mainstream conservatism, which seems laughable to me - Phelps had mainstream Democratic credentials for years, and still calls himself a Democrat. He isn’t a creature of the modern political right at all.
Not to say he’s a representative Democrat either - certainly he’s not. He’s his own special breed, ostracized by all, and hating everybody.
Don’t worry, I’m not talking about you.
How come you know Churchill exists? I’m talking about the people who are the answer to that question.
It’s not on account of the UC-Davis campus paper that millions of people, coast to coast, know who Ward Churchill is.
Tons of stuff is reported in college and university papers every week. Only an infinitesimal fraction of it ever gains wider attention.
Reflect a moment, if you will. When and where did you first hear of this guy? As many of you may know, and a couple actually care, my politics lean somewhat leftish. So I pay attention to the lefty sites, sniff out news amusing and appalling. Visit Daily Kos, Carpetbagger, Atrios, Talkings Points, all pretty respectable if decidedly partisan sites. I don’t recall any of them speaking of this guy in any terms but bewildered contempt.
More to the point, they didn’t introduce him to me, not by any stretch. I didn’t first hear about him from a glowing tribute in Firedoglake, I’m pretty sure I first heard of him from Hannity and His Bitch (I love to watch that vein in his neck throb just before he goes totally mental…).
How about you? Odds are fair to decent you first heard about him here. Now, my faculties have dimmed, perhaps, no longer have a mind like a steel trip…but I’m gonna guess that the first mention of him on these boards was a tighty righty howler monkey, going apeshit about one of thier favorite bugbears: the disloyal, troop-hating, child-warping and indoctrinating lefty academic.
Ward Churchill is just that, nothing less perhaps but certainly nothing more. If a lefty heard of him at all, it would have elicited nothing more than a disdainful shrug. But for a tighty-righty, he’s manna from Heaven, he embodies all of their most deeply cherished symbolisms, the Effete Lefty Intellectual (Real men don’t nuance…)
So that’s my bet here, that he’s a part of the SDMB conversation just like that bucket of pus Phelps. But not because an admiring lefty brought him to us. We wouldn’t be talking about him at all if you guys didn’t bring him up all the time.
Care for a bet in reverse about who brings Phelps to public consciousness?
This is what’s so amusing to me about you loosey-lefties (a term I wouldn’t normally use but I can let this ‘tighty-righties’ nonsense go unanswered for only so long). So many of you guys try to lay claim to the moral high ground yet you act just like those you condemn, only from the other end of the spectrum.
No, the idea actually was discussed as a deliberate germ-warfare campaign (by British officers who knew nothing of the existence of germs but who understood that infectious diseases could be transmitted via bedding and clothing); but there’s no proof it was ever implemented. The Master speaks.
Yeah, now this thread will have a smallpox-infected blanket floating around in it.
Aren’t Shodan and Starving Artist bad enough? 
See post 61. There’s a big difference between what people are conscious of here on the Dope (where pretty much everyone’s been tired of All Your Base and Badger Badger Badger for years now) and the general public (few of whom have heard of either one).
AFAICT, what’s brought Phelps to public consciousness (to the extent he’s there at all) is his protesting at and harassment of the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq, and the attempt of the family of at least one such soldier to hold him legally responsible.
If you’ve got evidence to the contrary, please do share.
Apparently not, but I’ll wait on your evidence. Who knows, you may surprise me yet.
I’d actually wager that Phelps gets a significant amount of negative right wing press, probably equal to (if not in excess of) negative left wing press. This certainly wasn’t true when he was showing up at funerals for folks like Randy Shilts and Matthew Shepard, but since he’s started targetting soldier’s funerals, he’s become a much bigger target in the eyes of the right. “That guy’s a homophobe! Let’s get him!” has a limited amount of play even on the left, but “That guy doesn’t support the troops! Let’s get him!” is polling gold for the right.
I would largely agree with you, Miller. I mentioned Phelps primarily because elucidator mentioned him in the post I was responding to. I could have found a better example.
…Or against the war. Her opinion, her character, her loss, or anything else about her is totally irrelvant to the larger question of U.S. national security strategy. She’s been a pathetic pawn of both sides for a long time. People should just ignore the poor woman.
For the record, it was Bill O’Reilly who first raised a big stink about this guy. Doesn’t matter much to me, if the issues raised were legitimate ones.
Were they to you?
And again, I think the damage to the left was limited because the left did its level best to demonstrate that Churchill didn’t speak for them. That was the right thing to do.
At risk of sounding partisan to the nth degree (ie, when she agrees with me she matters and when she doesn’t she doesn’t), I don’t entirely agree. Her opinion and character is certainly irrelevant. And her specific loss is irrelevant. But her loss as a representative example of American families which have been devastated by the war is at least somewhat relevant. Trying to put a human face on sterile casualty numbers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Toppling Saddam might be worth it for only 3000 Americans dead. I mean, that’s a tiny number! Compare it to Vietnam! But when you realize that one of them was this one particular guy with a mother and a family and hopes and dreams, maybe it makes you stop and think and really realize what 3000 dead young Americans means.
Not that that’s some airtight logical proof with steps and conclusions and stuff. But I do think it’s relevant and reasonable.
Sorry, I disagree with this as well, since she didn’t prove to be representative of anyone but herself. Even much of of her family, who also knew her son, broke with her over her actions on this.
I recall at least one article from a father of a fallen soldier entitled “Cindy Sheehan Doesn’t Speak for Me.”
One data point here.
I first heard about Ward Churchill back in the early 1990s in a lefty mag called Z Magazine. For those who don’t know it, it’s quite a radical left publication (considerably to the left of Kos, The Nation, etc.), with commonly featured writers including Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Barsamian, Lydia Sargent, Arundhati Roy, and some other lefty “usual suspects.”
Anyway, Churchill used to write for Z now and again, mainly about Native American issues, and that’s where i first ran into his work. I also bought a couple of his books, such as The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret War Against Domestic Dissent (1990) and A Little Matter Of Genocide: Holocaust And Denial In The Americas 1492 To The Present (1998), and despite the revelations about Churchill since then, i think those books contained some valuable work.
The book on the COINTELPRO Papers, written with Jim Vander Wall, reproduced a lot of FBI documents from the battles against domestic dissent. While that might not seem such a big deal now, in the pre-WWW era it was one of the few places where you could easily find such material gathered in one place. And while A Little Matter Of Genocide contained some problematic arguments and hyperbole, it also raised important issues about the treatment of Indians in America since the arrival of Europeans.
Interestingly enough, it seems that Churchill’s last contributions to Z Magazine, and to its website, was back in April 2005, around the time that public criticism of him moved beyond his post-9/11 speech and really began to focus on the allegations of academic dishonesty. It’s a shame, i think, that no-one at the magazine appears to have written about the subject since then, because i’d be interested to know whether they still support him, or whether they have cut him loose.
Actually, a search of the SDMB archives suggests that the first person to make a substantive reference to Churchill on these boards was someone who is pretty hard to assign to either the “tighty righty” or “loony lefty” end of the political spectrum. It was Liberal.
In a thread from October, 2002, someone asked Lib what he thought of Churchill, and he replied:
Over time, however, it appears that Lib’s views changed. In February of this year, he said:
About a week later, Churchill had apparently slid so far down Lib’s scale of respectability that he qualified as a Democrat (:)):
I don’t single Liberal out here for any reason except that he was the first person i found making a substantive comment about Churchill, and he’s a well-known member of the SDMB. Nor am i trying to imply that his changing attitude is the result of any sort of inconsistency or hypocrisy; in fact, it demonstrates that reasonable people can change their minds as new evidence comes to light.
As for threads specifically about Ward Churchill, i’ve found two [ETA: now three] before this one:
February 1, 2005
Ward Churchill: “intellectual martyr” is not a synonym for “fucking douche-tard”, started by Sampiro.
February 19, 2005
Why all the fuss over Ward Churchill?, started by BrainGlutton.
ETA: missed one
May 29, 2007
Ward Churchill has been fired. Is this important?, started by Sunrazor.
Not exactly strong support for your argument that it’s the righties who “bring him up all the time.” 
With regard to Ward Churchill, there are two reasons that Indian councils are watching him so closely these days: (1) he is a renegade warrior, as I said in the referenced post; and (2) he may have lied, at least in part, about his Indian heritage, as he is either unwilling or unable to produce documentation to back up some of his claims. Those are the two whopping bright shiny no-nos in most Indian cultures. You do not run off from the tribe picking fights that the chief has not authorized, and you do not claim someone else’s ancestor as your own (nor do you deny your own).
In other words, his deeds have amounted to a virtual secession from the tribe.
All that said, he has made outstanding contributions to tribal scholarship. That cannot be taken away no matter how scummy he may turn out to be. He is sort of our own Nikola Tesla. My biggest gripe with him, apart from the big two, is that he espouses an extreme leftist agenda, which he ties ignomiously to Indian culture. Our people have been historically communal, for example. But these were voluntary relations. There was no Communist Manifesto. Property was never taken from one man to give to another except in cases of restoration after trial, or in cases of earned property from battle. There were no class struggles, and certainly no entitlement mentality. All charity was private and voluntary.
I disagree, mhendo. I think 'luc is talking about who’s bringing him into the awareness of the general public, or some reasonably large subset of it.
This board, of course, means nothing. There are so many things we’ve talked to death here, that only a tiny slice of the general public has ever heard of.
Ditto, I expect, for Z. I can’t recall having heard of it, despite my lefty leanings. (Admittedly, I’m a Johnny-come-lately to the left, having been pretty much a centrist through the mid-1990s, but still.) Even if Churchill was the toast of the town amongst its readership, that didn’t mean that liberals who relied on news and opinion sources no further left than Mother Jones had ever heard enough about him to have an opinion of him.
A minuscule minority excepted, those Americans that know who Ward Churchill is, do so because Bill O’Reilly decided to make a big deal out of him in early 2005, and the rest of the right-wing hyena pack quickly followed suit.
Hardly sufficently important to bring up, what, three and a half years after the fact, wasn’t it?
I mean, if I opened a Pit thread tomorrow about some overlooked outrage from mid-2004 by some wingnut none of us had ever heard of before, I’d get (quite reasonably) ridiculed by the likes of you, right? Even if there was some contemporary, but trivial, peg to hang it on, like that wingnut getting invited to the White House?
(For instance, a couple of months ago, a passel of wingnut bloggers got to meet with Bush. A pit thread about something incredibly outrageous that one of the more obscure bloggers at that meeting had gone off on a few years back would have still been a bit much, right?)
Yet here, when O’Reilly did essentially the same thing in reverse, using his much more valuable media access to do so, why didn’t you ridicule him, and why aren’t you doing so right now?
You may have noticed that that hardly ended the story, given the existence of this thread.