Bush: Lapdog of the French?

James S. Robbins had an article on Bush, Chirac and Syria in NRO last week. Stunning and prescient stuff, I'll bet, but it was the photo teaser for the story that really caught my eye (and dragged it 15 feet, as the great Emo once said). On its face it's a standard shot of Bush and Jacques Chirac grinning at each other just before they Indian wrestle during the president's European trip last week.

But look closer. What in the world is that on Bush's head? I'll tell you. It's a jaunty little fez. Now how the heck did Jacques Chirac talk him into being photographed wearing that? I mean, he looks ridiculous. And it's not just your everyday "funny hat" either. It has "SYRIA" emblazoned across it, in case you hadn't noticed. Chirac forced Bush to promote Syria! In a funny hat! How did this happen, and what does it mean for our foreign policy? I, for one, fear the worst.

Obligatory Oscars bloglet

Worst. Oscars. Ever. Aside from Hillary Swank, of course.

Update: Did these two watch the same show?

No buyout

In the most craven possible response to the Ward Churchill disaster, CU may offer the professinator a buyout of his teaching contract, the Denver Post reports today. His lawyer says $10 million might do the trick. This is really not funny anymore.

For the moment.

(via Belmont Club)

Alien v Predator

Just watched the movie. What a disappointment. I mean, c'mon: despite the title, there's no courtroom action at all. What, they thought we wouldn't notice? Once again, Hollywood shows they think we're dumb. Predator wins, though*, which is good. Is that different from how the book ends?

*spoiler alert!

Update: Finally found a review of the book: "I Read The Novelization in about a week And It Was a Great Read I Really Couldn't Put It Down I Really Had To Find Out What happens at ever turn I Really Recomend You All Read It It Really Will Follow The Movie But Might Have A Different Twist I Really Can't Wait For The Movie AUGUST 13."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post.

Update II: Have just been informed, rather rudely, that a "spoiler alert" should come before the actual spoiler. My sincere apologies.

Bunco artist

Gee, Ward Churchill sold someone else's art as his own? Belmont Club has a good take, so I'll just repeat the end of this post: "Like [Holocaust denier] David Irving's, Churchill's mendacity is his defining characteristic. It will be found in everything he's written, and in his every public act." Apparently, now, in his private acts as well.

Update: Psycho Ward: "Get that camera out of my face!"

The "house nigga."

A frightening post

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone--from the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959).

Wow. That sounds a lot like my house, except for the stuff about upright walls and bricks meeting neatly. And yeah, it's pretty difficult to "walk alone" around here with the tenants always at me: "We need electricity." Check the lease. "There's mold growing on the dog." Check the lease. "The rats ate baby Brittany's toes." Check the friggin . . .

But the "not sane" part? That fits: My house is a four-plex, I am its landlord, and I am not sane. The landlord's lot, after all--bloodsucker, parasite on the people, kulak ripe for denunciation--is not exactly an emotionally nurturing one, and on me it has taken a horrible, bloody toll.

Charnel house.

The asylum I try to oppress is a Denver Square-bungalow sort of thing, haphazardly converted into four apartments, if one includes the basement hovel (as opposed to the other hovels, in one of which I live). It's an old place, built in 1912, and has been somewhat hardly used. Even in the best of circumstances, of course, with a building that old things have a tendency to--go wrong--at times. And when they do, I hear about it. Loudly.

But My Tenants Love Me

Don't get me wrong. I love all my tenants, and they, well, they love me:


Tenants: We love the landlord!

And being a landlord has other consolations. One of mine is to put on my special-bought motheaten cardigan sweater and go stand in the backyard. Just . . . stand out there. And maybe mutter a little: Thanks a lot for leaving your beercans all over the yard. . . Why do I have to clean up your dog's crap, you drug-abusing freaks? . . . Yeah, go ahead, yell at me for staring at your wife. I know all about you because I watch you through your curtains you goddamn welshing little PERVERT, etc. Sometimes while doing this I lean on a rake and wipe my nose on my sleeve. The tenants think I'm hilarious:


Tenants: The landlord is hilarious!

They really think so.

Swelled Head?

But just so I don't get a swelled head (by the way, "Swelled Head?" is a good subhead, isn't it? It looks so "Madison Avenue": "Swelled head? Just two tablets will reduce that giant oozing cranium to the size of a dried persimmon!" Hey, I'm an adman!), I always keep in mind the humbling words of the prison poet Tyrone Green*:

Dark and lonely on a summer's night

Kill my landlord

Kill my landlord

Watchdog barking. Do he bite?

Kill my landlord

Kill my landlord

Slip in his window

Break his neck

Then his house I start to wreck

Got no reason

What the heck

Kill my Landlord

Kill my landlord

C-I-L-L-- kill my landlord

*as played by Eddie Murphy in the dim dark past of SNL.

Churchill advocates terrorism! (and always has)

Michelle Malkin has a link to transcripts of a talk Ward Churchill gave in which he more or less advocates terrorism. But this is not new, nor is it surprising. In fact, in much of what he's written the resort to violence and terrorism is a constant subtext. Check out the now-famous Satya article, for example, which fairly drips with tricky little incitements to violence. If Churchill talks like this in a magazine whose supposed subject is vegetarianism, where wouldn't he?

Whaddaya mean "we," paleface?

Ward, yesterday:

"'Is he an Indian? Do we really care?' he said, quoting those he called his 'white Republican' critics. 'Let's cut to the chase; I am not,' he said."

Ward, in the current issue of Socialism and Democracy (second paragraph):

This brings up a personal hook in addition to my intellectual motives [for calling the treatment of American Indians "genocide"]. It comes with the fact that I am myself of Muscogee and Creek descent on my father’s side, Cherokee on my mother’s, and am an enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. I’m also married to an Ojibwe woman of the Lynx clan, from the Onegaming Reserve in Northwestern Ontario. The truth is, although I’m best known by my colonial name, Ward Churchill, the name I prefer is Kenis, an Ojibwe name bestowed by my wife’s uncle. So there’s that, and I suppose it speaks for itself.

Sure does, Kenis.

(via Instapundit)

Correction: Oh for God's sake. How do we go from this: "'Is he an Indian? Do we really care?' he said, quoting those he called his 'white Republican' critics." "'Let's cut to the chase; I am not,' he said."

To this: "Is he an Indian? We really care. We're trying to protect the rights of Indians to divine for themselves, say this circle of flies in the form of white reporters circling a manure pile like it's of all consequential importance. Cut to the chase on that." The Denver Post explains, and quotes D.E. Stannard, one of the professors who arranged Churchill's speech at the University of Hawaii at Manoa:

Professors and reporters attending Ward Churchill's speech in Hawaii on Tuesday disputed a Honolulu Star-Bulletin report that Churchill admitted he is not Indian. "He didn't say that, and it's causing a lot of uproar here," said David Stannard, one of a dozen professors who helped sponsor Churchill's appearance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "In fact, he said the exact opposite," Stannard said. "It's all over the place now (on the Internet). How do you put it back in a bottle? This gives strength to his argument that he is being misrepresented by the media."

Yes, it does. Well, if the quote is now accurate, Ward called himself a "manure pile," so we don't quite come away empty handed.

(via Instapundit)

Bet the neighborhood will be quieter

Hunter Thompson was a hero to me, as he was to most aspiring journalists in the 1980s. It was a requirement for membership in the Society of Aspiring Journalists back then. But I'll leave it to others to cover his indelible impact on journalism and, uh, lifestyle possibilities. Here I just want to point out a couple of interesting things in the reports of his suicide.

First was the family's statement, which began like this, according to the Denver Post: "On Feb. 20, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado."

"Fortified compound." Pure Thompson.

The Post goes on to say that Thompson was "[r]egarded as one of the most legendary writers of the 20th Century . . ." What the heck does that mean? If they had said one of the finest writers of the 20th Century one could simply have said pish, tosh and bosh. But probably they were referring to his propensity for public disturbance (often involving firearms) and drugs, which us folks in Denver got more frequent reports of than elsewhere. That was always fun, in an eye-rolling way: the good Doctor is off (or more likely on) his meds again.

Finally, AP quoted Paul Krassner: "'It was hard to say sometimes whether he was being provocative for its own sake or if he was just being drunk and stoned and irresponsible,' quipped Krassner, founder of the leftist publication The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International (YIPPIE) party."

Quipped?


R.I.P.

See you in PE, Porky

Look, I don't like bullies. Having been picked on far more than my share back when I was a (graduate) schoolboy, I know how humiliating bullying can be.

But honestly, if I saw this kid on the playground:


Pound me.

I don't think I could resist. Especially if he went around saying things like, "We will go to the negotiating table anytime if there are mature conditions for the six-party talks thanks to the concerted efforts of the parties concerned in the future," or,

"He also said that North Korea 'would as ever stand for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and its position to seek a peaceful solution to the issue through dialogue remains unchanged.'"

"Mature conditions . . ."; "as ever stand for denuclearization . . ."

You know, I wouldn't do anything too bad: take his glasses, give him a noogie, knock his books out of his arms--at worst, de-pants him. That's all. My friends who remember me in school, though, say I'm dreaming: Li'l Kim would kick my ass.

Hunter Thompson

Hunter Thompson has killed himself. Shee-it.

(via Tim Blair)

Why don't they just marry each other?

A few things to add to the previous post:

The strange confluence of thought between Ward Churchill and Holocaust deniers like David Irving is most evident in their attitude toward Deborah Lipstadt: for both, she is the enemy. Irving's website, which obsessively documents Lipstadt's every move in squibs with titles like "The racist record of Deborah Lipstadt" and "Still dining out on the Holocaust," also, incredibly, has a link to the Churchill piece in Socialism and Democracy. They probably didn't read it real good, is my guess. (Yesterday, Irving's site also had a link to a little piece that gloated over Lipstadt apparently having to undergo surgery recently. It's gone now. Lovely people.)

There are several books besides Richard Evans' on the Irving libel trial, among them Lipstadt's History on Trial; R.J. van Pelt's The Case for Auschwitz; and D.D. Gutenplan's The Holocaust on Trial. (Didn't spend much money thinking up titles, did they?)

I'd forgotten that during the libel trial in 2000 Irving addressed the judge as "Mein Fuhrer."

Lipstadt is tough: as a student in the 80s she was kicked out of the Soviet Union for clandestinely distributing copies of the Torah; she also, after her legal team shredded Irving in the libel trial, said: "This was an exercise in pest control." She was right, but I hope she's got protection. Churchill and Irving might for their own reasons refrain from violence, but what about their more ardent followers?

More Churchillian rhetoric

It only adds to his charm that, as the Jewish Collegiate Review points out today, Ward Churchill was throwing the "Eichmann" epithet around even before he published his 2001 incivilities. This time, though, in an article he wrote for the journal Other Voices in 2000, Churchill named a particular "little Eichmann": the respected Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt.

I know. He's scum; scum does stuff like that. But it's illuminating to learn why Churchill hates Lipstadt, and especially how David Irving, the bloviating Holocaust denier Lipstadt dared accuse of Holocaust denial--Irving sued for libel and lost--figures into Churchill's thinking.

In the current issue of Socialism and Democracy (which, oddly, devotes the rest of its endless pages--18 articles in all--to examining "hip-hop culture"--what's Ward doing in there?), Churchill unlimbers his logorrhea to complain about, among much else, Lipstadt and Irving.

In the article, "An American Holocaust?" Churchill says accusingly that Lipstadt, in her book Denying the Holocaust (the book Irving sued her over), "repudiat[ed] the idea that the camps in which the U.S. put Japanese Americans during World War II might be comparable to some of the nazi concentration camps." No. A reputable historian says the internment camps weren't the American equivalent of Dachau? Unbelievable. What is wrong with the woman? Churchill continues:

A couple of points are worth highlighting here, beginning with the fact that a page after they’re first mentioned the Japanese Americans have somehow been transformed into “Japanese.” From there, they quickly mutate into a sort of “racial fifth column,” real or potential, at least in the quite reasonable perception of U.S. policymakers, and thus their mass internment is presented as an “unfortunate” but entirely justifiable national security measure. Unfortunately for Lipstadt, the nazis often used an identical rationalization, picked up by postwar deniers like Harry Elmer Barnes, to explain why it was “necessary” to intern the Jews.

Churchill's aim here is to show that Lipstadt is a "Jewish exclusivist"--a historian who believes that the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely horrible event in human history. This "exclusiveness," says Churchill, requires that historians like Lipstadt ignore the multitude of other holocausts as bad as or worse than the Holocaust--including, of course, the "genocide" against American Indians that, Churchill says, continues today. Lipstadt and mainstream historians like her, in short, are worse than David Irving. Where "neonazis" like Irving deny merely a single genocide, "those embracing the exclusivist posture of 'Jewish uniqueness' deny many."

Churchill goes even further: the refusal of mainstream historians to call what happened to Indians genocide akin to the Holocaust (or to acknowledge that Japanese-American "concentration camps" like Manzanar were as bad as the German sort) makes them complicit in genocide themselves. Just before Churchill calls Lipstadt an "Eichmann" in the Other Voices piece he says:

Denial of genocide, insofar as it plainly facilitates continuation of the crime, amounts to complicity in it. This is true whether the deniers are neo-Nazis, Jewish exclusivists, renowned international jurists or provincial Canadian judges. Complicity in genocide is, under Article III of the 1948 Convention, tantamount to perpetration of genocide itself.

Okay. Which historian should we prosecute first? (I nominate Doris Kearns Goodwin.)

Churchill's rather genial contempt for Irving is pretty odd too, considering how similar their historical methods are. As Richard J. Evans details in his account of the fight over historical methodology in the Irving libel trial, Lying About Hitler, Irving in his many books on the Nazis often manipulated sources, mistranslated documents, and grossly exaggerated German civilian casualties, most egregiously in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. He did all this, as the judge in the libel trial found, in order to minimize the Holocaust and portray it as just one barbarity among many committed by both sides.

Churchill, as Paul Campos pointed out last week, has also played fast and loose with his sources, in his case in order to accuse whites of genocide against Indians. Does anyone think he confined such practices to just the two incidents Campos mentions? As one who has actually read some of Churchill's smaller piles of word turds and lived, I can safely say: no way. Just like Irving's, Churchill's mendacity is his defining characteristic. It will be found in everything he's written, and in his every public act.

(via Instapundit and Ed Cone)

Update: Quote of the year already? Ward, in the above-noted Socialism and Democracy article: "I don't want to be accused of leftwing bias here, especially since I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a leftist, so I'll note that the record in the socialist countries [in admitting and making reparations for their very own genocides] is no better" (page two, last paragraph). What's the name of the rag this piece appears in again? Oh yeah: Socialism and Democracy.

Update II: Where else but the blogosphere would I learn that there exists a publication called the Jewish Collegiate Review? Rah!

Update III: The Socialism and Democracy link seems to be dead. Very odd. You can still find at least the first part of Churchill's "An American Holocaust?" here. Very, very odd.

Update IV: It's back up. Darn. Thought I might have me a little midnight redaction scandal there.

Dearth is good

Not to jinx it, but has anyone else noticed the sudden dearth of IED attacks and suicide bombings in Iraq over the last, say, six or seven days? Am I wrong about this? (The link is just to USA Today's front page, which doesn't tend to ignore such things, and on which I have seen no such news in the last, again, six or seven days. I think.) If I'm right, could this have anything to do with the elections and the Sunnis' apparent decision to work within the system?

Update 18 February: Shit.

Ticked off at the MSM

Peggy Noonan has a good piece on the so-called "salivating morons" of the blogosphere in the WSJ today. The last graf is particularly nice:

Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of thecountry are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they're going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it's there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They're going to do some big work down the road.

The blogosphere: Saving the world, so you don't have to.


Typical blogger.

(via Instapundit)

Update: But why didn't Peggy or her editors bother to check the spelling of Drew Pearson's name? Who does she think she is, Frank Nelson?

Update II: Oops, somebody sneaked in and fixed it (they originally spelled it "Pierson"). My first bloody scalp, no doubt.

Counter-intuitive

In blog terms this story is older than the wax in grandpa's ears, as the saying goes, but what the heck, I'm a new blogger and I get to play a little catchup.

As everyone knows, the "counterinaugural" demonstrations in D.C. January 20 were a pathetic, if annoying, bust. And they were well-mocked at the time. But none of the usual blogosphere humor-persons bothered to deconstruct (i.e., make fun of) the counterinaugural news conferences held to publicize the demos earlier that month. Too easy, I guess. But nothing's too easy (or too old) for me, so I'll do it.

The first (both were on C-Span) featured Redefeat Bush founder David Lytle, and is worth watching just for Lytle's astoundingly arrogant and whiny attack on the "corporate media"and its shills sitting there taking down his words: we were right about no WMDs, we were right that there was no connection between Saddam and Al Quaeda, we were right that the mission wasn't accomplished, we were right, we were right, we were right--and we were most right in saying that you media tools (Look at me when I'm yelling at you!) hid the truth until it was too late.

Then, voice quivering with Stalinist passion, Lytle announced the tools' punishment: no free food or booze at the counterinaugural ball. He was very forceful about this: "You're gonna have to pay to get in. Sorry guys [he wasn't sorry at all! You could tell!]. The free lunch is over." Not exactly lining them against the wall and shooting out their beastly livers, I guess, but you could tell the reporters were crushed. You mean we have to pay for our Vienna sausages and Mr. B at your crummy ball? Time for some soul-searching.

The second press conference was held by a (slightly) more comic coalition of the aggrieved, and featured the president of the National Alliance of Black Panthers, Shazza Nzingha:


Whoa.

Shazza, while utterly in the possession of Satan, was nonetheless smartly turned out in a silky little (well, big) neo-Maoist confection topped by a perky Panther beret--just the right touch to pull the look together. She spouted the usual drivel as I drifted in and out of consciousness: "worse off now than we were in slavery . . . united with all oppressed people . . . people's uprising . . ." and so on. Nothing special.

Then there was this woman, Sarah Kaufman:


Yikes.

I don't remember anything she said (probably illegal-fascist-war stuff, huh? That a good guess?), just that she had a tiny head and looked like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca:


Mom?

Finally, there was Rebekah Abernathy, who ditched the tight perm in this Washington Post photo (she's second from right) for one of those artfully anarchist hairdos that's short but, you know, wild. She also got the only substantive question, posed by an intrepid reporter from the Waterbury (CT) Republican American: Are there going to be puppets? Yes, Rebekah said. She had an oddly deb-sounding voice for an anarchist, with that upward inflection at the end of every sentence, so that all her answers sounded like: We're going to have some giant Anarchist puppets? That can be seen through a crowd of people? And there's this one spider puppet that, like, symbolizes the system we're fighting against? And so on. Weird.

What's really remarkable about these "news" conferences is that even though they took place only a month ago, they sound like something from a different age, if not planet. Bush's reelection, the inauguration and, above all, the Iraq election make these revolutionaries sound only more like what they were already: mummies, hurling curses as they line up to be stuffed back in their sarcophagi.

Update: No, I did not specially select the above pics (except for Dame Judith) to make the subjects look goofy or ugly. These were the only ones on the C-Span site. Apparently nobody looks at them before they're posted.

Whiny update

Michael Tremoglie at Frontpagemag.com has a story today about Ward Churchill's cavortings with Sadaam Hussein's Baath party--a week after I wrote about it. Sigh. But he doesn't have the story of how Churchill began his career at CU, nor of his involvement in the "human rights award" given to AIM by Libya's Moammar Quaddafi, both in my original post. I'm trying to let him know this because it deserves wider circulation than I can give, what with my zero links and zero comments and zero readers and zero li--.

Sorry.

Mmmm, feet

Though I'm not a member of the pajamahadeen, I do have some slippers that make for comfy--and classy!--blogging:


From left: Billy Bob, tennis ball, Homer, Homer.

Slipperblogging! You'll be hearing more about Billy Bob, too (he threatened).

(Post title and fancy dress slippers courtesy: The Wife.)

Clueless Times

By the second graf of today's New York Times story about bloggers' role in the professional demise of Eason Jordan, you can tell it's going to be a dull-hatchet job. There, we learn from reporter Katherine Q. Seelye how bloggers discovered "flaws" in Dan Rather's story on Bush's National Guard service. "Flaws." I suppose you can describe profferring forged documents as evidence and repeatedly lying about it as "flaws," but that doesn't exactly convey the scope of the scandal, does it?

(Via Instapundit and Jarvis)

Long dark "Ni!" of the soul

Organizing my bookmarks yesterday I noticed a link to the blog of a guy named Joe Carter called The Evangelical Outpost. Had to think about that. Nothing at all against evangelicals, I just don't have much occasion to seek them out (except for my father-in-law when we need "minor" carpentry work, praise God. Him I seek out all the time). So why would I have bookmarked this Mr. Carter? Had I gotten drunk, gotten religion, gotten drunk, gotten religion, gotten drunk again--as used to happen so often--and finally, in despair, linked to him for succor?


Yes I am in complete possession of my faculties, thank you very much.

Not this time, anyway. No, it turned out I just wanted to read his series on starting a blog. Now I have, and it's excellent stuff. Some things I still have to do: add permalinks and a blogroll, snazz up the template (I know who I'm gonna steal from), find free ads, and (politely! No stalking!) schmooze other bloggers. And write. Say, what's this "aitch-tee-em-ell" thing I keep hearing about, anyways?

Oh, Mr. Carter has a really good blog himself, a witty look at all kinds of stuff (movies!) from, shockingly, an "evangelical worldview." And he has the biggest bloody blogroll I've ever seen, by far. He blogrolls everyone who blogrolls him, I think, and lots and lots have. It's sick. And I'll probably be his first rejection.

Bonus question: from what book is the illustration above taken?

Gonna build me a fence

My house sits atop a high-prairie bluff overlooking the Platte River Valley in central Colorado. Here’s a view from the edge of the bluff:



Ward's Land: The Platte River Valley. CU ethnic studies professor and indeterminate brand of Indian Ward Churchill wants it back. Controversy rages over who will be responsible for removing "improvements" made since Denver's founding in 1859.

Edenic, ain't it? Well, even though insensitive people keep calling it "The Shining City in a Hole," I like Denver, and I'll probably post about it from time to time. [Jeez, why are you so defensive about Denver?--Ed.] [No, I will not, not, not use the "--Ed" gimmick. Please God, please, don't ever let me be so desperate. Kill me first. Please.--Me.]

Naked Came the Stranger

Tim Blair links to a site that recounts the hoax a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy writers pulled off by writing an intentionally lousy book, Atlanta Nights, and submitting it to PublishAmerica, a press which had boasted of how "picky" it was in its book selection and, much worse, had called those scif-fi and fantasy writers hacks. Despite the publisher's alleged pickiness, of course, and its disdain for sci-fi/fantasy writers, PublishAmerica duly brought out Atlanta Nights.

But it isn't the first time something like this has happened. In 1969, 25 Newsday writers, using the come-hither pseudonym "Penelope Ashe," each wrote a chapter of a supposedly shocking potboiler, Naked Came the Stranger. The only requirements were that each chapter be really, really bad, and that it contain at least two sex scenes. The writers' aim, sort of like the sci-fi guys', was to show just how low American literary standards had fallen. They succeeded: the book was published, became a bestseller, and was even made into a (no doubt lousy) porn movie. But check out a bigger pic of the book's original cover. It's great.

The Drunkablog brand--your guarantee of quality

I’ve known what the name of this blog would be for a long time. “Drunkablog” is a slight riff on the old Alcoholics Anonymous term “drunkalog,” meaning the stories AAers tell about the troubles their drinking brought—“Once I lit a cigarette after pounding a pint of Mr. B and woke up in the hospital with second-degree burns of the tongue"; "when I was 37 I drove my Vistacruiser through the front doors of a Pottery Barn and decapitated two lawn jockeys”—that sort of thing.

This is not to make fun of AA, much, and actually I’m an occasional attendee at meetings myself. Yep, I'm a drunk. No longer active, but if it came to it I could tell some pretty rancid stories. I was a bad ‘un. Before I quit drinking, in fact, I always scored 9 or 10 out of 10 on those “Are YOU an alcoholic?” tests Dear Abby used to run. I was rather proud of this, but then I usually “test well,” so I never got a swelled head or anything (except from the drinking).

But this blog isn’t going to be about drunk driving, job loss, wife beating, cirrhosis of the liver, dying in a ditch--none of that stuff. Drunkablog is just a great name. I think.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I finally went to register at blogspot and found the name was taken. Then I looked at the blog. Oh, my. Just what this blog is not going to be. But doesn't it make you want to know what happened to the guy? Is he even still living? Just that single desperate cry, then silence. Scary.

So the upshot is I stole the Drunkablog name from a soul-crushed, down-and-almost-out alky by putting a “The” in front of it. Yeah, I know: Nice guy.

He's bad

Chutch would not be silenced! Here's the Denver Post's account. Pretty much what you'd expect. Power to the people!

Churchill, Quaddafi, Saddam--together at last!

Last week Glenn Reynolds, Belmont Club and others pointed to a statement by the National American Indian Movement claiming that amiable chucklehead and 70s TV star Ward Churchill is not, as he purports to be, an American Indian. Today, in an utterly unsurprising development, CU's Paul Campos (link from Instapundit) says in the Rocky Mountain News that there are also serious questions about Churchill's past scholarship. This aspect of the story, as anyone who's looked into Churchill's career could predict, will only grow.

What I don't think anyone in the blogosphere has sufficiently noted, though, is national AIM's long and colorful history with both Churchill and the Colorado AIM movement of which he is a leader--a wild Marxist-Leninist roller-coaster ride during which each camp excommunicated the other multiple times for deviating from the party line and accused the other of, basically, every crime in the book.

First things first. A typically verbose 1998 Colorado AIM manifesto intent on defending Churchill's Indian bona fides also provides at least a hint of how Churchill weaseled his way into CU:

As to community recognition, Churchill has been active in several [sic]. In Boulder,where he has lived the last twenty years, Churchill's record speaks for itself.He was hired as an Indian by the 'committee of the Boulder Valley SchoolDistrict's Title-IV Indian Education Project in 1977. He was hired as an Indian by the all-native staff of the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program at the University of Colorado Boulder campus in 1978. "He has always been accepted as an Indian by the Indians in this town," says Norbert S. Hill, Jr., an Oneida and former director of the Educational Opportunity Program, now head of the Boulder-based American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Hill cites that Churchill has been repeatedly honored by the Oyate Indian Student Organization at University of Colorado over the years. "I don't agree with him on a lot of things," Hill concludes, "but I've never known anybody who worked harder for Indian rights.

No doubt. So, what was this "Opportunity Program?" How did it determine Churchill's Indian ancestry? Or did it? And what was the "opportunity" it presented to Churchill? Finally, how did Churchill move from this program into a tenure-track position? We know he didn't get a degree from CU.

These are all interesting questions, to me at least. Far more interesting is the fact that national AIM's antipathy to Churchill goes way back, at least to 1986, when, in typically Trotskyite fashion, the Colorado AIM chapter, of which Churchill and Russell Means were (and are) co-directors, and National AIM split over--of all things--Nicaragua: the Denver chapter supported the Musquitos against the "genocidal" Sandinista government; brothers Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt. national AIM's leaders-for-life, supported the government over the Indians.

Things got worse in 1993, when Means, Churchill and Glenn Morris (best known for organizing the fun-filled anti-Columbus Day demonstrations every year in Denver) published an “indictment” in which, speaking for the Colorado chapter, they accused the Bellecourts of myriad betrayals of AIM's revolutionary principles. This document, despite its dreary and back-biting rhetoric of "liberation," is fascinating reading. Its many, many charges against the Bellecourts range from credit card scams, embezzlement, and "espionage" to seizing "dictatorial authority," sucking up to the American government by accepting its money, and (here's a twist) abetting "genocide" against indigenous peoples.

The Bellecourts, according to the indictment (I'm not going to keep putting that word in quotes), have over the years returned such compliments in spades, repeatedly calling Churchill and Glenn Morris "white men" and "police agents."

All this lefty schismaticism would merely be funny if not for a couple of the indictment's charges. These concern the International Indian Treaty Council, national AIM's "diplomatic arm," which was "the first Indigenous organization recognized by the UN as a consultative status Non-governmental organization in 1977." Somehow, though, despite its no doubt crushing schedule of UN consulting, the IITC has been a very busy little organization in other areas as well. The Colorado AIM indictment (I suspect Churchill's hand in these quotes) hits a high spot or two:

In 1990, Libya announced it was preparing to bestow a human rights award, carrying with it a substantial cash subsidy, to AIM POW Leonard Peltier. Vernon Bellecourt, in a separate trip to Libya, intervened with Libyan officials, arguing that the award was being cast "too narrowly." A compromise was then effected whereby IITC, or a mechanism it created for such purposes, would receive and administer the cash award--reputedly $1 million, U.S.--on behalf of a number of indigenous rights organizations, including the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (LPDC). To date, LPDC has received no such funds. In statements to the press, Bellecourt has indicated that LPDC and other indigenous organizations are "free to apply" for funds which may then be granted, subject to approval by a specially-constituted board in which he plays a prominent role. This situation self-evidently represents a perversion of the Libyan intent in making the award, converting their gesture into an instrument of financial coercion used by Bellecourt in his efforts to impose his will on the Movement as a whole.

Jeez, how low can you get? Good old Libya, to express its compassion for and solidarity with the struggles of indigenous peoples everywhere, gives a $1 million "human rights award" to AIM, and what happens? The Bellecourts scarf it all up, and Churchill and his pals get nada! Admit it, you'd be mad too. But in the indictment Churchill has an even more interesting example of the brothers' maladroitness: their habit of pissing off people who just want to help:

Through the IITC, cordial diplomatic relations were developed by 1979 with the Baath Socialist Party of Iraq. Through this relationship, substantial contributions were made to AIM and to the struggle for the return of the Paha Sapa (Black Hills) under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. In 1982, although he occupied no official position within IITC and had received no other authorization to do so, Vernon Bellecourt made public statements "on behalf of AIM and IITC, extolling the Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran. Insofar as Iraq was, at that time, in a state of war with Iran, Bellecourt's ill-conceived pronouncements resulted in an immediate suspension of Iraqi support to IITC, AIM and the Paha Sapa land struggle. Whatever personal benefits Bellecourt may have gained as a result of this conduct, Iran provided no compensatory support to the Movement. The whole fiasco represented a net loss, both politically and financially, to our liberation sruggle.

Rats! A net loss to the liberation struggle! But I wonder what "substantial contributions" these nitwits were getting from Saddam, don't you? Churchill doesn't say. All that matters is that those fathead Bellecourts got Saddam mad at AIM. Ward would never betray Saddam like that! (And as far as I can tell, he hasn't.)

There's much, much more on the protagonists' various websites, including accusations of murder, but for the moment I can stand no more. The upshot of all this? Churchill, Means, Morris, Colorado AIM, the Bellecourts--some of them are criminals, all of them are radical leftist thugs, and any claims any of them make about anything or anyone, including Ward Churchill, should be regarded with extreme scepticism. Given Campos' revelations I probably shouldn't say this, but--a pox on both their houses!

Update IV: Paul Campos' article reminds me of the comedy gold Keith Windschuttle struck when he examined the work of Australia's "black armband" historians and their myth of Aboriginal genocide. Are there any historians out there willing to subject the writings of our home-grown politically correct historians to that kind of scrutiny? I haven't heard of any, but I bet they'd find all kinds of defugalties and malfeasance.

Update III: Just heard a student of Churchill's at CU on Michael Medved's show say that Russell Means will be speaking tonight in Chutch's place. Not an improvement.

Spell-binding

By the way, I don't think anyone has pointed out that Churchill can't even spell the name of the school from which he got his degrees: It's SangaMON State, mon, er, man. How do I know? I too got a degree from that venerable, though sadly no longer extant, institution.

Update: On Monday CU, citing security reasons, cancelled a speech Churchill was going to give tonight to "explain" what he meant in his 9/11 comments. Churchill has filed suit to have the speech go on as scheduled. Stay tuned.