I was stunned to read"A Last Take on Ward Churchill??" by Kelly in Kansas. She buys Roger Kimball's argument at Armavirumque. It builds on Joel Mowbray's"The Ward Churchill Money Trail" at David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com to link Churchill through Boston's Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights to the whole academic left in the United States. Kelly, it's the same wingnut logic that informs Horowitz's DiscovertheNetwork.org.

And, Kelly, that same logic can work this way: In 2003, Ward Churchill's On the Justice of Roosting Chickens won honorable mention from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. But if you go back only a decade, Ralph Luker's The Social Gospel in Black and White won the Gustavus Meyers Center's Prize; and we know that Kelly in Kansas was seen having dinner in January, 2005, with Ralph Luker in Seattle. By my count, that's only four degrees of separation between Ward Churchill and Kelly in Kansas. If word of that gets out, Kelly, the Wingers will be demanding to know if your signed loyalty oath is on file in the personnel office at Such'n'such U.

Adam Kotsko - 2/24/2005

I can respect that.

Richard Henry Morgan - 2/23/2005

I predicted you would say that!!!

Adam Kotsko - 2/23/2005

Yes, poor Bush -- so slandered by being associated with a group that was slandering his opponent.

I predict that you will defend the Swift Boat Veterans, or at least try to get me to concede they "have a point" or "were on to something" -- because you, my friend, are a predictable person!

Richard Henry Morgan - 2/23/2005

BTW, over at Drudge they have a link to a report from the Hawaii speech, where Churchill is quoted as saying he is not a Native American.

Richard Henry Morgan - 2/23/2005

If memory serves, this is precisely the logic the NY Times used to draw lines from the Swift Boat Veterans to the White House. Just thought I'd point that out.

Adam Kotsko - 2/23/2005

Since Ward Churchill is a Republican, does that mean that he's only one degree of separation from George W. Bush? If so, where's his loyalty oath? How can we be sure that he hasn't been influenced by Churchill's maniacal ranting?

And if Bush is connected to Churchill, he is therefore in "the Network" -- providing even more convincing circumstantial evidence for Matt Yglesias's earth-shattering article alleging that Bush is actually an agent of the Iranian government. Perhaps the people at Powerline were justified in the idea that a president could be a traitor to the American cause -- even if their biases caused them to apply this intuition to the wrong man (Carter).

Of course, why couldn't it be both?