Churchill Gets Canned

For Ward Churchill, the raving lunatic-cum-college professor, the ‘chickens have come home to roost’.

The University of Colorado finally grew some gonads and fired his sorry ass.  For the last couple of years this moron has been spewing some of the most outrageous crap ever produced by a member of the academic intelligentsia.

Some of his egregious statements include likening the World Trade Center victims to “little Eichmanns”:

Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire — the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved — and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” — a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” — counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in — and in many cases excelling at — it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”
Link to the rant: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html

Get that? Those hard-working business people with families and productive lives were just cold-blooded ‘war profiteers’ who deserved what they got. It’s too bad one of those planes didn’t careen into Churchill’s house. I’d trade 3000 of his ilk for the lives taken during that 21st century ‘day of infamy’.

He also has a penchant for claiming ancestry not in his background:

At various times, according to press reports, Churchill has described himself as Cherokee, Keetoowah Cherokee, Muskogee, Creek and most recently Meti. In a note in the online magazine Socialism and Democracy he wrote, ”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.” In biographical blurbs, he is identified as an enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees. But a senior member of the band with access to tribal enrollment records told Indian Country Today that Churchill is not listed.
George Mauldin, tribal clerk in Tahlequah, Okla., told the Rocky Mountain News, ”He’s not in the data base at all.”

According to Jodi Rave, a well-known Native journalist and member of the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Three Affiliated Tribes, Churchill was enrolled as an ”associate member” of the Keetoowah by a former chairman who was later impeached. …Rave said that she made this discovery as a student in a journalism class at the University of Colorado. She was also in a class taught by Churchill. When her article came out, she said, he dropped her grade from an A to a C minus.
Suzan Shown Harjo, a columnist for ICT who has tracked Churchill’s career, said that aside from the in-laws of his late Indian wife, he has not been able to produce any relatives from any Indian tribe.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16911

Erroneous accusations of intentional smallpox infestation:

Churchill tells his readers that the Army gathered blankets from a smallpox infirmary in St. Louis, shipped them to Fort Clark and deliberately distributed them among the Mandan as a way to spread the lethal disease. Churchill also has said on several occasions that a “post surgeon” or an “Army doctor” told the Indians to take refuge in their home communities – which he alleges helped spread the disease – and that the military locked away the vaccine that could have saved Indian lives. But a Rocky Mountain News examination of Churchill’s assertions found that they aren’t supported by the sources he cites. In fact, the pages of various books he refers to not only don’t buttress his argument, they contradict it.

Three of the authors – including a UCLA professor who is a member of the Cherokee Nation – unequivocally refute the assertions that Churchill attributed to their works. “My own view is Churchill probably just wanted to have something more to holler about,” said the UCLA professor, Russell Thornton. “I think it’s just out-and-out fabrication. It depends on how you want to look at it, but in one sense, it’s just making up of data, and that kind of thing shouldn’t be tolerated in scholarship or science.”
The News also found that Churchill’s story grew over time, with new characters and details emerging in successive versions, and that some of his basic facts changed from one telling to another, including fluctuations in his estimates of the number of American Indians who died.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18339

Lying about his military service and committing plagiarism:

During an interview with Jodie Rave he ‘recounted’ his Vietnam experience, mispronouncing “Cavalry” all the while.

“Waking up in the morning in what was called Indian Country in 1968 and finding out I was a member of the 7th Calvary (sic). Not literally, there was a 7th Calvary (sic)…..In the morning in what they called Indian Country, this is what hostile territory is called in Viet Nam, yaa know, I figured I was a member of the Calvary (sic) and not the Indians.”

“I decided to get on the right side, which isn’t with the Calvary (sic), it wasn’t with the United States. And just about everything I’ve done since then was drawn from that experience and all kinds of things have added on. But everything has been very, I can make sense of it, [i]t’s been very consistent in that way.”

This tale seems highly unlikely, since military records indicate Churchill was trained as a truck driver and projectionist in the Army in 1966-68, and there is no evidence that during his 11-month stay in Vietnam he saw battle at all. But if Churchill did not have these experiences himself, where did he get the story he recounts?

PirateBallerina has learned that Churchill lifted the tale of bravery and awakening in Vietnam from an anonymous account by a Native American veteran that was published a year earlier, in 1992.
The following quote appears in M. Annette Jaimes’ 1992 book “The State of Native America, in a chapter contributed by University of Arizona Professor Tom Holm. During the 1970’s and 80s, Holm collected Vietnam recollections from Native American veterans, and published various papers and books chapters based on these recollections. Here is the exact passage from Holm’s chapter (pp.362):

As the Creek-Cherokee veteran quoted earlier put it: “I went into the Army and to Vietnam because I’d seen the same John Wayne movies as everbody else and thought I was doing an honorable thing, that war was the ‘Indian Way’…..But when I got to Vietnam I found that my job was to run missions into what everybody called “Indian country”. That’s what they called enemy territory…I woke up one morning…and realized that instead of being a warrior like Crazy Horse, I was a scout used by the Army to track him down. I was on the wrong side of everything….

His life resume is chock full of delusions of grandeur, lies, unoriginal thought, and venomous, unsubstantiated incriminations.  Everytime he’s caught telling another whopper, it’s the big bad rightwing conspiracy boogie man out to get him.  He’s vowing a lawsuit and lots of hellraising to boot.  His attorney David Lane opined : “The message is, there will be a payback for free speech”

Uh, no sweetpea. There are consequences for unprofessional, irresponsible behavior. That is the message.