Churchill's lawyer: Will school committee be Nazis?

If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention. Ward Churchill, the lying, scheming, plagiarizing bastard who thinks having a job here in the United States makes you a kin to the architect of the Third Reich’s “final solution” and therefore deserving of a firey, agonizing death is being investigated by the University of Colorado for “ethical issues.” Seems they might have missed the plagiarism Professor Churchill had spread all over academia when they granted him both a job and tenure and have begun looking into it. Oh, and the Professor’s claims that he’s an American Indian, a membership he’s relied upon for both access and standing to spew such foulness from his mouth? Bzzzt. Sorry. Not an Indian. Says who? Says the tribe(s) he claims membership with.

So, you’re accused of plagiarism twice, fabrication of historical events, and falsely claiming membership to a racial specification. How do you respond? Why, by calling the people investigating these issues Nazis, of course! And you use the modern-day bullhorn of a lawyer to do it:

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A lawyer for the professor whose remarks about Sept. 11 victims touched off a firestorm wants officials to clarify how they intend to prove he is an American Indian, asking if they plan to use “the Nazi standard for racial purity.” A University of Colorado faculty committee is investigating whether professor Ward Churchill should be fired over allegations he plagiarized others’ work, and that he falsely claimed to be an American Indian to give his work more credibility. “Do you wish to employ the Nazi standard for racial purity? Do you wish to employ the standard adopted by the United States government for determining Japanese ancestry in order to qualify for internment?” attorney David Lane asked in a letter dated Monday to acting chancellor Philip DiStefano.

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Hey, the Nazi thing worked before, right? Of course, that’s not the standard being used and both Churchill and his lawyer know it. The standard is “are there any American Indians in your ancestry?” So far, no one has found anything – not a single case – to justify his claim. He’s certainly not offering anything and, I suspect, that’s because he knows damned good and well there’s nothing to offer. My own family had bit of a legend going on for years and years that we had just the minimum recognized amount of American Indian blood in us. I firmly believed that. When the time came that I researched our genealogy, I was faced with a cold, hard fact: there’s no Indian in our bloodline. I went back no less than 150 years in every ancestral line we have. (A lot further in some, I might add.) The simply truth is there isn’t any in our bloodline. My claims to the contrary don’t make it so, and “Prof.” Churchill is in the same boat.

Only he can’t say that, can he? Since his academic credentials and tenure are wrapped up in this fairy tale of his, it’s a real problem for him that it’s not true. Since the truth offers no cover for him, he needs to attack the person of the people opposing him. So they drag out the Nazi references and point madly with both hands first at the faculty committee then at the Nazis and set that look of offended astonishment on their faces. Then they just hope and pray that everyone falls for it.

I’ve written on this apparently favorite tactic on the Left’s part before. It was weak then and it’s weak now. There was a reason Godwin’s Law came into being on Usenet many years ago. It’s recognized that reliance upon the utterance of a Nazi reference to stand in for reasoned argument is the sign of a losing position and an unwillingness to participate in rational discussion. Churchill started in that position and it doesn’t look like he’s going to get any better any time soon.