WARD AND THE WINGNUTS

It's hard to believe but at Michelle Malkin's place, there was live-blogging about the University of Colorado's Board of Regents decision about Ward Churchill. Malkin notes that other bloggers at "Pirate Ballerina" are doing the same thing. How can an obscure college professor rate all this attention? Because for the wingnuts, he's a symbol of the entire Left! Malkin calls him "king of the moonbats." Commenter Mr_Conservative_Cat writes: "Churchill, a radical leftist in a state which embraces radical leftist ideals like a blue blanket, in an institution within that state which represents the leftest of the left."

I had a chuckle when commenter Brian72 wrote that Churchill was a "dirty-hippie." Commenter Rational Thought wrote that Churchill is just another member of the group of "Old leftist hippies." Will wingnuts ever get over the 60s?

Some of the wingnuts seem to think that Churchill was fired because of his political views, not his plagiarism and other serious academic misdeeds*:

On July 24th, 2007 at 10:17 pm, zorro said:
The wheels of Justice do indeed turn slowly. It’s a good thing the “former” professor has been sacked. Hopefully, others in his “business” will take note and learn to fly straight. Stick to teaching the topic at hand, leave the pontificating to some other venue.

* For those interested, here are the charges as reported by the Rocky Mountain News 7/24/2007:

Findings of a faculty investigative committee released last year:

Historical facts: Churchill manufactured events in which European Americans intentionally spread smallpox to kill Indians. In one such event, the Army is said to have distributed tainted blankets to Mandan Indians. But no evidence backs the claim.
Elsewhere, Churchill claimed the United States adopted a formal racial code to identify Indians, similar to the code used by the Nazis to identify Jews. U.S. law includes no such code, legal scholars say.


Plagiarism: Churchill published an essay on water issues in Canada that closely resembles a pamphlet by a Canadian environmental group. He also borrowed a work on fishing rights originally published by Canadian scholar Fay Cohen.

Falsifying sources: Churchill wrote essays under the names of other people, which he then cited as independent sources in his footnotes.