The revolution will not be criticized

Some years ago I copyedited for a failing online movie-review site. No pay, of course, but after much pushing they did let me try my hand at writing a review. Hell, they didn't care anymore. They'd been paying their reviewers in stale Goobers and Raisinets for months, and one well-known critic had actually threatened to quit over it, so sure, boy, write us a free review!

My assignment: Dead Man on Campus, a sort of Weekend at Bernie's without the existential wordplay. This movie was so bad it made people vomit uncontrollably just recalling it. Unfortunately, so did my review. No shame in that. Even the best writers can make people throw up sometimes.

Dialectical definitions

But I, at least, am always eager to improve. That's why I was happy to run across the Maoist Internationalist Movement's page, How to write a MIM movie, music or book review: MIM's approach to the superstructure. My writing may occasionally make people puke, but it took MIM to show me the secrets of writing sick-making reviews consistently. The MIM page starts, for example, with a glossary of terms I'd never even heard applied to movies before, terms like:

• Fascism, reaction--intolerant violence that can never bring about social harmony.
  
• Right-opportunism--Liberalism practiced by those claiming to be communists, not Liberals.
  
• Subjectivism--celebration of one's own tastes and opinions without consideration how they were produced or are harmful to society in general.
  
• Progressive--characterized by advance toward social harmony, peace and improved humyn capabilities, what tends to abolish class, gender and national oppression.

Improved humyn capabilities, you face-stuffing phonies! This is an auteur theory that'll get you lazy bastards straightened out fast--or else. But reviewers under a MIM government won't actually have much to do anyway:

When MIM disapproves of a movie or song today, even in today's politically backward conditions, it means that that work is especially backward and will only look more so if the political situation advances enough to put MIM in power. Hence, when we disapprove of something we mean to ban it upon seizure of state power.

Short of banning, however, MIM thinks many works simply need a little editing:

The Russians under Lenin had some success with this problem by taking popular songs and changing the lyrics and contexts. We need to change a lot of lyrics in pop music and reissue it as unchanged as possible. Likewise with some movies and theater, we need to reissue/recycle popular works.

Over there

Who will take on this mighty task of redaction for the people? The heroic oversight worker, that's who!

Oversight workers should be altruistic party members willing to go to prison/re-education camp for failure. These oversight workers should also have oversight assistants who are also free from any threat of imprisonment [Huh?]. Hopefully with the combined efforts of good "frontline" workers and oversight assistants, no horribly misogynist, racist or chauvinist work will see the light of day under socialist auspices and no oversight party members will end up in prison or re-education camp.

No prison or re-education camp for oversight workers! Hopefully!

Next week: How it's done: the Maoist Internationalist Movement's review of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

"Champions of democracy"

The other day I ran across the website of Israel Shamir, an Israeli anti-semite and Palestinian shill whom I'd never heard of before, but whose type is familiar. Shamir is one of those plausible haters who maintains a thin veneer of reasonableness and even jocularity over his psychopathy, even when he's accusing Jews of (yawn) drinking the blood of Christians and Muslims.

The "distinguished contributors" to his site, while certainly in full agreement with Shamir on all things anti-semitic are not, alas, as sophisticated as he. There's the poet Siam, for example, who, in a poem dedicated to Edward Said, sings of

CITIES AND AREAS WHERE CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE IS
IMPLIED,
SUPPLIED,
APPLIED,
AND CAN NOT BE DENIED - LIKE,
nerve gas used on demonstrators in Gaza,
and water poisoning of those at the siege of Acre

That's what he wrote, yup, that's what he wrote. And then there's Lasse Wilhelmson, who writes (in "Zionism as Jewish National Socialism") that Israel "lacks a constitution and fixed boarders [sic]," and that it has "conducted genocide against the Palestinians for a hundred years." Lasse, be a good running dog of dumb-assery and go home. There's even a contributor named Cletus. It was difficult to find a picture of Cletus, but I did. (Didn't see that one coming, huh?)

Finally there's this man, Joh Domingo, the dentally challenged "idea-guy" of Shamir's neo-Nazi Gang That Can't Shoot Straight But It Doesn't Matter 'Cause They'll Use Gas.




Domingo: Lombroso was right.

In one article that lays some love on white supremacists, Joh points out that when "David Duke was the grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan . . .
[t]hey hanged black people from tree trunks. What they did was however small change compared to what the Ku Klux Knesset does on a daily basis."

Ku Klux Knesset. Good one, Joh. Joh, by the way, says he is black. And South African. And a long-time "activist" against Apartheid. Well, every fighter against Apartheid is a hero, right? Joh kind of libels poor David Duke, though, doesn't he? After all, Davy talked a good lynching, but I don't think he ever risked his 70s-Bowie look by actually participating in one.

(via Stephen Pollard)

CU punts on Churchill; headline writer loses valiant fight against 4th-down-kick metaphor

The CU committee investigating Ward Churchill has released its report--oddly, four days before the date for release previously announced by CU chancellor and committee head Phil DiStefano. No sanctions for Churchill's "Little Eichmanns" speech, of course. But also no mention of his advocacy of terrorism, or of his repeated threats to those who displeased him, including another professor at CU, or of his art fraud. The committee didn't even talk to Churchill. Charges of plagiarism (no permalink; top item on Dalhousie College report in pdf) and fraud (for Churchill's repeated claim that he is an American Indian) were dumped on the school's standing committee on research misconduct. As KHOW's Dan Caplis just pointed out, that committee is made up of faculty members who, whatever they do about Churchill, must continue to work with their colleagues--including the 200 or so who signed a petition in support of Churchill. Good times.

Update: Pirate Ballerina! Come back! Heed a weary world's "arrrgh" for help!

Ebony and ivory

Last month convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal published a statement in support of the professinator, "In Defense of Ward Churchill, Historian!" (now available in audio!). In it, the vicious but handsomely dreadlocked murderer runs through the usual checklist of America's shortcomings--its "McCarthyism," its "export of violence," its "documented hatred of dark peoples" and killing of "almost countless" numbers of same, etc.-- and says that Churchill is being persecuted for pointing these crimes out. Just like Mumia!

Mumia, unlike Churchill, is that recurring figure in socialist mythology, the criminal as revolutionary. Various Black Panthers, Weathermen, Baader-Meinhoffers, and even American Indian Movement members have attained this status in the past. Solzhenitsyn wrote about the type in The Gulag Archipelago: the "socially friendly element"--violent criminals--who, because their crimes were committed against a corrupt and inequitable bourgeois society, were romanticized as a proletarian vanguard.

Churchill in that tradition might be expected to admire Mumia and thugs like him, and he does. In fact, despite his claims to have engaged in "armed struggle" and to have taught the Weathermen how to make bombs, Churchill has apparently confined himself to threatening a couple of women. Only natural he'd look up to a real revolutionary like Mumia.

(via Pirate Ballerina)

Chutch returns!

Iowahawk has a new episode!

(via Tim Blair)

Comrades!

Join me at once in singing our National Song to Comrade Trofim Lysenko, who made the steppes bloom!

Merrily play one, accordion,
With my girlfriend let me sing
Of the eternal glory of Academician Lysenko.

Brothers! I could not hear you! You must testify, comrades!

He walks the Michurin path
With firm tread.
He protects us from being duped
By Mendelist-Morganists.

That rocks, comrades.

Actually, the song is quoted in Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (1996), which somehow I missed until now. Oh well, all it does is show once again that Communists are slow learners: China's Mao-induced famine from 1958 to 1962, which the book recounts, was an uncanny duplicate of the Stalin-induced Soviet and Ukraine famines 30 years before, right down to the grain-requisitioning and the kulak-killing and the forced collectiviiiiiiizing glavin! And the Lysenkoism. Oh, and 30 million dead. So, let's have another song to the "Barefoot Scientist," comrades!

Wanted: cutesy river pun for title

In the mail: Montana's Wild and Scenic Upper Missouri River: a guidebook for the Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River and the Upper Missouri River National Monument (breathe), by a couple guys going under the names Monahan and Biggs. My review, mercifully shorter than the book's title: Lousily written, poorly self-edited, and too expensive. Some neat old pictures:


Dum de dum, diddle dum: Where's that damn boat?

The only reason I bring up Montana's Wild & Etc., actually, is to mention that two or three friends and I are going to canoe the White Cliffs section of the Missouri this fall. We do at least one fairly long river trip every year, and this year that's it. One hundred and seven miles of cliffs (natch), Lewis and Clark campsites, and eager, but no doubt sternly protected, beaver.

And all that is just a weak excuse to post a few pics from our trip last September on the Green River in southeastern Utah. The Green itself needs no excuse, of course; it has everything:


Canyons.


Campsites.



Vacation homes. (photo courtesy John W. Doyle)


Public art.

Representative sample, part one

Neighbors are chancy. They can be hardworking, helpful, friendly, active in the community--you know, good people. Or they can be mine. A few vignettes, then, of people I have actually lived next door to (part two sometime or other):


The Wise Junkie and His Lady Fair

One time I heard them fighting about the rent. Well, when it started it was about the rent. It ended like this:

She: Come out of the bathroom, you chickenshit!

He: Unh-uh! You got a knife.

She: Yeah I got a knife, because I need to kill you.

He (decisive): I ain't comin' out.

She (pleading): Come on out, honey. I need to kill you.


Tassel-tits and The Man

Then there were the neighbors at Third and Grant. She was a stripper, he was just--The Man. The kind with No Job. Soon after I moved next door, these two decided to construct--from scratch, exclusively between the hours of ten p.m. and four a.m., and 20 feet from my bedroom window--a really rather fine redwood hot tub. Dandy! A fine project! But when I asked politely if they might consider changing their hours of construction, they threatened me bodily harm.

Another time, their two Chows dug out of their run and nearly killed--she was just taking the air in her own back yard, for God's sake--my elderly little dachsund Snuffy. Ripped all the skin and fur right off her hind end. It got stuck back on okay, more or less, but when I requested compensation, they threatened me bodily harm.

Finally the happy couple were busted and foreclosed on for running a drug and prostitution ring out of their house. That was unexpected. But as they moved their junk out prior to (one hopes) their incarceration, they remained true to form: spotting me sitting innocently on my porch swing enjoying the evening, they threatened me bodily harm.

Salacious tidbit: they had a sex dungeon (is there any other kind?) set up in the basement. It had a really rather fine redwood pillory.


The Psychotic Geologist

This neighbor, for reasons that remain unclear*, tried to brain me (de-brain me, actually) with my own telephone one night after I stupidly let her in when she was drunk. It was one of those 74-pound rotary dial phones too, like Barbara Stanwyck used in Double Indemnity to cave in Fred MacMurray's skull. The cops showed up (after I wrestled my phone back, shoved her out, and called them), but she had already beaten it somewhere.

Much worse, for a couple of months thereafter, whenever she closed down her favorite bar (Club 404, dread lair of the $6.00 T-bone) she'd come home and, with a broomstick, begin to bang unrythmically on her ceiling (my floor) while intoning my name, zombie-like--BANG Johhhhhhhnnn BANG. BANG. Johhhhhnnn BANG Johhhhhnnn. BANG. Very spooky; she really had mental problems.


Club 404: draft Bud, cheap steaks, paranoid schizophrenia.

*She never actually said it right out, but I think she was under the delusion that, some months before when I had taken care of her cats while she was out of town, I had used the opportunity to sniff her panties. In truth, I'd rather have sniffed her cats' litter box.

Update: A "movie maven" who wishes to remain anonymous e-mails that it isn't Double Indemnity in which Stanwyck caves in Fred MacMurray's skull, but rather an episode of My Three Sons. Thanks for setting me straight, "anonymous!"

UnPRINCIPled attack

Meandering down the hysterical LGF-linked Democratic Underground thread about the U.S. moving another carrier group toward the Middle East, perhaps to back up Israel if it takes out Iran's nuke plants, I ran across this comment (#20) by one "Clem C Rocks." It deserves its own paragraph:

"We have another Archduke of Ferdinand incident."

Clem, obviously, is intent on muscling his way into the respected and lucrative field of "global mastermind."

Ex-wife: Churchill heap big jerk

Pirate Ballerina's got the scoop.

Tone deaf

Got my first comment last week, from a guy laboring under the name "G-Man." It was appended to one of the literally (literally!) thousands of pieces I've done on Ward Churchill and will, I'm afraid, set the "tone" for comments on my political writings in general: "Stick to the dog. He looks like fun." Look, "G-Man," if that is indeed your name, I'm the global mastermind. Billy Bob is just the sidekick. Got that? The dog is the sidekick.

He is fun though:


Billy Bob: "fun," says owner.

Update: "G-Man" is apparently a fun guy himself--the kind who writes about his billable hours.

Caplis: Plagiarism story "throws monkey wrench" into CU-Churchill buyout deal

KHOW's Dan Caplis, citing "very reliable sources" within the University of Colorado, said the revelation of another charge of plagiarism against Ward Churchill "throws a monkey wrench" into a buyout deal that was reported to be close to completion earlier today. Talks now are "stalled," according to Caplis. This latest blow to Churchill is "not only a smoking gun academic fraud story, but there was the threat of violence too," Caplis said.

Update: Caplis again: deal is "off the table" for now.

Can Spring be far behind?

It's Frozen Dead Guy Days again in Nederland.

Buyout

The Denver Post says CU and Ward Churchill have reached agreement on a buyout. I'm going back to bed.

Attitudes set in stone

Had to be downtown today, so I took some pictures of the amusingly un-PC Pioneer Monument at the intersection of Colfax and Broadway (the first one isn't mine, though):


Pioneer monument: it's also a fountain!

That's Kit Carson up top. He's looking West, where he heroically spies more gold or furs or Indians to kill.


Kit: "a small, stoop shouldered man, with reddish hair, freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring."

The monument was designed by Frederick MacMonnies to mark the end of the Smoky Hill Trail, the route many gold-seekers followed to Denver. MacMonnies apparently planned to top the monument with a bronze Indian, but Denverites, some of whom in 1910 no doubt remembered the Indian troubles, were outraged, and the brave was replaced by Carson. But even if built as planned, there still would have been plenty on the monument to offend modern sensibilities. Take this unregenerate specimen:


Mighty hunter: Ah jus' kilt me a elk.

Or this "heroic" pioneer woman, constricted by her gender to the roles of babysitter and marksperson:


Sighted: the skulking Churchill Indian band.

Actually, the only article on the monument I could find was a 1999 Westword story about a crazy guy who climbed it while supposedly wired with dynamite. He wasn't, but he still got his message of hope or whatever out to a despairing world:

I have been chosen by the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Mormons) to serve as their endtime Son of Man. In their belief at the endtime they must themselves LITERALLY CRUCIFY their Son of Man in order to travel, along with their resurrected ancestors, to their three-tiered concept of heaven. Everyone else goes to hell. I value all life, including my own, and DO NOT wish to die under this sorcery. Please tell this to all Christians you know especially Christian pastors. They may very well understand.

Ain't history fun?

Update: Wouldn't "The Skulking Churchills" be a great name for a polka band? (Apologies to DB.)

Hoffman: general public "don't understand" Churchill

In a fawning interview conducted yesterday by KHOW's Dan Caplis, outgoing CU president Elizabeth Hoffman got a chance to show both her fake evenhandedness and her general cluelessness on the Churchill controversy.

After allowing Hoffman to recite her accomplishments as president, Dan asked gently if her comments about a "new McCarthyism" around Churchill were "taken out of context." Hoffman, sounding relieved, agreed, and explained how she meant that there was a new McCarthyism from both ends of the political spectrum:

I see very similiar kinds of attacks coming from the left as well. I worry about the future of intellectual debate in this country if every time someone opens their mouth and says something the least bit controversial [!] everyone who's offended piles on through the internet, the radio, the newspapers--it stifles debate on both sides.

On Churchill's advocacy of violence:

It's a very fine line, Dan. Oftentimes academics are trying to illustrate things by talking about violence without necessarily advocating it themselves. Certainly if we go back to the 1960s with the Weathermen, that was very clearly violence. It was absolutely not only advocating violence but engaging in violence. And that's one of the questions we're asking, is Professor Churchill advocating violence, or trying to help his students understand why other people might advocate violence. These are very, very different questions.

Dan: Would you agree that if Churchill is crossing the line into violence, that would be beyond the boundaries of academic freedom?

Well, again, it's very fine. Is he actually, purposely inciting people to violence, or is he trying to get them to understand why other people, such as the folks . . . the 9/11 terrorists, why they might be engaged in violence. And sometimes, academics have a tendency to say things in ways that perhaps the general public don't understand the subtleties of what they're trying to say.

Her line on a possible buyout for Ward? "We are looking at all options."

Caplis and Hoffman then played kissy-face for the last three or four minutes of the interview. Caplis is married to Aimee Sporer, the "it" girl of Denver TV news in the 90s (he embarrassingly proposed to her live on her newscast). Both Caplis and Hoffman, it appears, still love Aimee. Yurck.

Update: Pirate Ballerina says Churchill for CU president! Absolutely. As part of his buyout Churchill should also insist on a statue of himself in a prominent place on campus. Prospective students and their parents could then see the hero, and hear tales of his brave fight for the freedom to speak truth to power. Yeah, that's the ticket.

There be the great white leftist! (argggh)

The fine Churchill-maddened folks at Pirate Ballerina (motto: "Oh, grow up!") have their usual tasty Churchillian blogginess today, including a link to a Ward-penned piece in the Rocky Mountain News in which the professinator once again makes the laughable assertion that he doesn't advocate violence. It's full of the usual mendacious drivel about "the German theorist Rudi Dutschke's concept of the 'long march through the institutions,'" and how "young people's consciousness" is the only "weapon" Churchill advocates using. Yeah, right. As the pirate says: "This is getting too easy."

The fetchingly tutu-ed and eyepatched bloggers also link to a Denver Post piece in which even that liberal rag expresses its fed-upedness with the Churchill mess, and calls on CU to get rid of him. But check out the last brave paragraph:

Given the political hue and cry, dismissing Churchill without tangible cause would ignite a firestorm of support and sympathy for a fellow who doesn't deserve a whiff of it. No wonder there's interest in buying him out and being done with it.

Tangible cause? Tangible cause? Keep digging, Posties! You'll find something. In any case, not exactly a ringing declaration of principle, is it? In fact, it sounds rather like the Post wouldn't mind at all if CU just paid Churchill off. Sickening.

Churchill chit chat on KHOW

KHOW 630's Caplis and Silverman are talking about CU president Elizabeth Hoffman's resignation. Caplis: this means a buyout for Churchill. Silverman (more or less): not one nickel, by God!

They interview congressman Bob Beauprez and Gov. Owens, who agree with Silverman, but up the ante: Not one dime. Unfortunately, they can't just make it so.

Caplis: David Lane (Churchill's attorney) has the university cowering, and it "makes me sick." Silverman: Buyout could come in "two or three days." They're rallying the troops (alumni) to tell CU to fight instead.

Guy calls. Long-time Indian activist: Ward is just crazy. I've seen him be violent many times. Uh oh. Caller's uncle is Vernon Bellecourt; he just blurts it out. The lawyer duo don't pick up on this, so apparently they don't know of the murderous, long-standing enmity between Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt's National AIM and Churchill's Colorado (or "Autonomous") AIM movement.

Somewhere in there Silverman also seriously suggested Caplis as a replacement for Hoffman. Caplis, a former CU student body president among much possibly less-relevant experience, didn't demur. He's a little oleaginous, but definitely a Churchill hardliner. That enough to be CU president? Sign me up!

Update: Here's Ward in the Rocky on Hoffman's resignation:

I see it as part of an agenda for a political viewpoint to assert absolute state control over the university. It's been public that the intent is to review every instructor, all content, every core course to vet it for adherence to a political line. She has been resistant to that idea, has been working to defend the principle of academic integrity in the face of almost stonewall opposition to the idea that quite a range of viewpoints are deserving of articulation.

CU president resigns

University of Colorado president Elizabeth Hoffman has resigned:

Hoffman, who has been president for five years, told the Board of Regents in a letter that her resignation is effective June 30 or whenever the board names a successor. 'It appears to me it is in the university's best interest that I remove the issue of my future from the debate so that nothing inhibits CU's ability to successfully create the bright future it so deserves,' Hoffman wrote. An independent commission reported last year that Colorado players used sex, alcohol and marijuana as recruiting tools. And in February, administrators took the first steps toward a possible dismissal of professor Ward Churchill, who likened World Trade Center victims to Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In an interview with The Associated Press, Hoffman said her decision to resign would give her time to help the university resolve the controversies. 'I've taken my future off the table so to some extent I can focus my attention on issues that face the university and not on my personal future,' she said. She cited the upcoming trial of a civil lawsuit that stemmed from the football recruiting scandal. 'Sometimes you need to say someone else perhaps needs to take the next step and that's what I've decided,' Hoffman said. 'I think it's really important to focus my attention on what needs to be done and not feel that I have to defend myself against attacks.' Board of Regents Chairman Jerry Rutledge said Hoffman would be missed.

Sick (of) Ward

It had finally hit. After many weeks of dreary Churchill watching I'd finally started to ask myself a question: Honey, I asked (I'm nice to myself), aren't you sick of writing all the time about this sucking black hole of an idiot? And I'd answer myself: Hell yes I'm sick of it, dear. I'm even more sick of reading about him, of hearing about him, of listening to him. And I'm especially sick of reading his garbage. I'm just sick of it all.

Then I watched Bill Maher's interview with Churchill (video via Crooks and Liars), and as he has done so many times now, Ward almost uncannily managed to revive my desire to help--in any legal and reasonably honorable way, I hope--get him, and get him good. Actually, Churchill looked like he was drugged. But with Maher to work the strings, he and The Great Wardo shot instantly to the top of the mercifully short list of evil ventriloquist acts.

Churchill is not just corrupt, he encourages corruption in others--in morons-for-the-ages like Bill Maher, and in self-described non-morons like me. It's not healthy to hate, my friends keep telling me as they tighten things down for the night, but can't there be some sort of dispensation when that hatred is directed against such a worthy object?

(via Jarvis, who linked both the big Churchill boys last night. Wonder if they're sick of ol' Ward yet.)

Update: Straitjacket pic courtesy of the fine folks at LatexPajamas.com, the leading maker of rubber-restraint products for the home. (Model: "Spankee.") Pajamahadeen, take note!

Update II: Yes, goddamnit, I am aware that ventriloquists' dummies don't have strings. Artistic license, man, lighten up.

Puppy love . . .

Billy Bob (in suave mode) sez:


Hello, Sasha. Are you by any chance,
uh, female? Ah, who cares. C'mere, baby.

And thanks to the great Dane for the plug. He's got three beagles. What's he aiming for? A beagle drill team?

KHOW: Churchill still entertaining

Somehow I just figured out that Denver KHOW's (630) Dan ("all Churchill!") Caplis and Craig ("all the time!") Silverman are, well, all Ward all the time, and have been for a while. I knew about their full-page ad in the Boulder Daily Camera the other day, but I had no idea their Ward page would be so entertaining, in the Churchillian sense.

So I've been listening to their show, and today their relentless attacks on Churchill drew blood (no permalink; top of Ward page for audio). Asked about the lawyer duo by a reporter, Churchill accused Caplis and Silverman of using quotes from his CD Pacifism and Pathology that were "spun completely out of context," and of "misinterpreting what I said to be an advocacy of violence, and doing it before a mass audience." As a result, Churchill said, Caplis and Silverman "are advocating through this misinterpretation violence and are doing it on a massive, broad scale to a very broad market. And I kinda wish they'd stop their terrorist speech."

Now that's entertainment. And of course, Churchill very clearly advocates violence on the CD, as he does practically everywhere.

Update: Silverman has a voice just made for newspapers.

And they called it . . .

My dog Billy Bob is the friendliest dog in the world. (Exceptions: mailmen, pizza guys, cable guys, meter readers, the weirdos across the street, tenants, small children, anyone he doesn't know).

Look, here he is:


Howdy! Do I know you?

Billy Bob is extraordinary in that he's friendly not just with (some) people, but with all living things. Here he is in a candid picture, eager to play with one of his little pals:


Lemmeout lemmeout lemmeout.

Billy Bob even enjoys hanging out with his "feathered friends" at Sloan Lake:


Hey, guys! Come back and play!

But Billy Bob's best friend is not Chewy the squirrel, or some goose, or me, or my wife, or even bacon. Billy Bob's best friend is his frisbee. And he's smart enough to know that, given the nature of frisbees, he must be a Platonist in that friendship: Frisbeeness, he has learned, is more important than any particular frisbee.


Sad truth: All frisbees die.

Well, there's my first dog blog. You've met Billy Bob, now--stand still! Don't hold your hand out like that!

Little Churchills

In the sort of semi-literate Counterpunch essay we have come to expect from the man himself, Emma Perez, the new chair of the Ethnic Studies department at CU, outlines the strategery of "neo-cons" in attacking Ward Churchill:

Ward is a prime target. He is vulnerable and, at the same time, has extremely high strategic value. In terms of his vulnerability: he can be isolated from support forces who would traditionally make it hard to attack a tenured faculty. There are faculty who have problems with his being American Indian or who have something against Ethnic Studies, etc etc-these faculty will be reluctant or refuse to defend him (until it's too late). As a revolutionary, he can be counted on to have a significant number of colleagues who strongly dislike him and will be reluctant or refuse to defend him (until it's too late). On top of all this, in the post-911 climate, moderates who would normally disagree with his views but then go on to defend his free speech rights and academic freedom, will hesitate because they are afraid of being cast in with his 'anti-americanism' (much like the McCarthy period) [my emphases].

One graf, one charge of racism, one charge of McCarthyism. C'mon Perez, you're slacking. Most of your colleagues could get that into a single sentence, and work in class and gender too. And "something against Ethnic Studies etc etc?" There's a scholarly formulation.

Perez goes on to point out parallels to other widely publicized cases of academic malfeasance:

The general strategy in forcing and then manipulating this "investigation" of Ward's scholarship shares key tactics with the neocon sinking of Emory historian Bellesiles in 2001 www.oah.org/pubs. There are also likely to be parallels with the campaign against Linda Brodkey at UT in 1991 as well as other campaigns through which they have been testing and developing their methods and tactics.

"Testing and developing their methods and tactics." Like requiring that historians adhere to basic standards of sourcing, statistical analysis, and record-keeping, maybe? Fascists! But Perez nails the landing:

We have to be as clear as possible about the big picture. This is much, much bigger than an individual attack on Ward. What we're looking at is a carefully developed, pre-existing national strategy that has been searching for exactly the right breakthrough "test case." It has found extremely favorable conditions in Ward's situation and in the post-911 climate. As they've been doing already in other areas they want to dismantle the structural footholds (academic freedom/tenure, ethnic studies) that social movements gained for people of color and liberal and progressive intellectuals inside academe during the 60s & 70s.

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the left. To be saddled with 60s detritus like Emma Perez, let alone Ward Churchill, seems unfair. But that, of course, is what their philosophy requires--that they become "little Churchills" themselves. My sympathy doesn't go very deep because the rot in the left goes to the bone.

(via Instapundit)