Ward Churchill Update

Pardon the constant linking to Instapundit today, but the man is on fire.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom strongly defended Churchill's purported right to say whatever he likes about the usefulness of terrorism; but he also suggested that there may be other reasons to can Churchill, and that we ought to be looking very closely at such reasons.

Well, looks like we have such reasons after all. And I'm not just talking about his very debatable status as Native American.

Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines what looks like a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill's part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story's most crucial facts, and then attributing these "facts" to sources that say nothing of the kind.

"One has only to read the sources that Churchill cites to realize the magnitude of his fraudulent claims for them," Brown writes. "We are not dealing with a few minor errors here. We are dealing with a story that Churchill has fabricated almost entirely from scratch. The lack of rationality on Churchill's part is mind-boggling." (Brown's essay can be read here.)

Well! That ought to do it, then!

We can get rid of this seditious bastard and still protect the left's "right" to make perfect jackasses out of itself, without academic consequences, at every available opportunity.

posted by Ace at 05:00 PM

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