Sunday, February 17, 2008

A blubbery stench

Benjie Whitmer's filthy Ward Churchill-supporting Try-Works blog is busy trashing longtime University of Colorado history professor Patty Limerick after she wrote a letter to the editor supporting Bruce Benson as president of CU (no link, h/t Snaps). Ignoring her (reasonable) arguments, Whitmer repeats another blogger's charges of cronyism because Benson serves on the board of the Center of the American West, for which Limerick is faculty director and chair.

Strangely though, Whitmer doesn't mention that Limerick was also a victim of Ward Churchill's scholarly fraud, when he misused a quote from her book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, to support his oft-repeated lie that the 1887 Dawes Act contained a "formal eugenics code" requiring a certain blood quantum as proof of Indianness. As Berny Morson wrote in the Rocky's series on Churchill back in 2005 Frontpage's reprint):
But the passage he cites from Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest refers not to the Dawes Act, but to a proposal floated - then dropped - a century later by the Reagan administration for administering the Indian Health Service.
What the hell, only a century off. (Professor John Lavelle's disclosure of this particular fraud is contained in his 1996 review (pdf, p. 111) of Chutch's Indians Are Us?: Culture and Genocide in Native North America.) (h/t, again, Snaps, and somewhere in there, Noj.)


It's guerrilla theater, man

Try-Works, by the way, has out-recreated Recreate68! by starting a campaign to have Pigasus II, a nonexistent pig, named president of CU. The campaign, of course, is a slavish imitation of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies' likewise hilarious running of a pig (the original Pigasus) for president of the U.S. in 1968. That's right: Wart, Benjie and the little Chutches think Abbie Hoffman was funny.

Here's the petition, just as childishly nasty as you'd expect. First signee, Ward; second signee, Benjie. Almost all the other signatures are fake, and include PB's Jim Paine, Grant Crowell, and, of course, Snapple. [Update: CU law prof Tom Russell is also an involuntary signee.]

Snapple points out, by the way, that Benjie and his Try-Works homonculi are still signing her name to fake deleted comments, and signing other banned enemies' names to some of the obscene and lying comments that are posted. Well, Ward's an old hand at signing others' work (and vice-versa), and Benjie hasn't been above praising himself through a sockpuppet, so, no surprise there.

Update: I misspelled "guerrilla." Fixxed. [update to update: and said the Dawes Act was passed in 1885 when it was 1887. Brain farts multiplying . . .]

No comments: