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Last week must have been a great one for our governor, who would like to be the Republican nominee for president in 2008. Elections in Iraq, the state of the union message, the hype preceding the Super Bowl -- and here's our Bill Owens, all over the news, requesting the resignation of Ward Churchill, a tenured professor at the University of Colorado.
According to Owens, Churchill's views are not simply
anti-American,
but also at odds with simple decency,
and antagonistic to the beliefs and conduct of civilized
people.
For Owens, there's no downside. By throwing some red meat to the right-thinkers, he gets to be a hero in certain circles vital to his quest for the White House. After all, he stood up to protect innocent college students from being led astray by leftist faculty on the public payroll.
He probably won't mention that Colorado taxpayers provide only about 10 percent of CU's income -- a percentage that has dropped substantially in the years of Republican government.
There's no real downside to this for Churchill, either. Even if the governor asks for his resignation, he's not compelled to give it, and he'll keep a job that pays about $100,000 a year.
If he does succumb to the pressure to resign, some other college will doubtless hire him. Plus, he'll be a celebrity, a noble martyr to academic freedom as he writes and talks about how the ignorant yahoos of Red State Colorado persecuted him. It should produce at least one book with a seven-figure advance, along with plenty of five-figure speaking engagements.
Churchill's three-year-old essay about chickens coming home to roost on Sept. 11, 2001, upset some people in New York, where he was supposed to sit on a panel at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., last week.
Among those complaining were children of people killed
at the World Trade Center in 2001, who found it offensive
when Churchill wrote that the casualties may have been
civilians, But innocent? Gimme a break.
They were
busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into
their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock
transactions, each of which translated ... into the starved
and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better ... 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.
It might be interesting to hear Churchill argue about
First Amendment rights, since he has argued that hate
speech
does not deserve constitutional protection, at
least if it's a Columbus Day parade. He was one of eight
arrested last October in Denver, and recently acquitted by
a jury.
Back to the essay, which has two main points:
1) That the United States of America is an evil nation, and therefore deserved to suffer from the Sept. 11 attacks, and
2) The Sept. 11 assault was orchestrated, not by Al Qaeda, but by Iraqis determined to exact revenge for children killed by U.S. bombing since 1991.
Gov. Owens says these views are far outside the
mainstream.
Consider a televised conversation on Sept. 13, 2001, between the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson. Like Churchill, they said our country was attacked because it is evil.
What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could
be minuscule if ... God continues to lift the curtain and
allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we
deserve,
Falwell said.
Robertson agreed: Jerry, that's my feeling.
He
later wrote that We have imagined ourselves invulnerable
and have been consumed by the pursuit of ... health,
wealth, material pleasures and sexuality.
So Churchill isn't the only one to see the Sept. 11 attacks as something that an evil America had coming. While there's some dispute about the precise nature of American depravity, they reach the same conclusion, and even agree that greed was a factor. Nor is Churchill the only person to see a connection between Iraq and the attacks by al Qaeda.
I think there's overwhelming evidence there was a
connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government,
Vice-President Dick Cheney said last year.
That evidence appears to exist only in his imagination, but if Cheney -- and Robertson and Falwell and Churchill -- want to hold and express bizarre opinions, that's their right.
And if Owens wants to chastise Churchill while remaining
silent about Cheney, Falwell, Robertson and others who make
outrageous and unsupportable
statements that are
at odds with the facts of history,
that's his right,
too.
But it does make one wish that there were more sensible ways to advance a political career.
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