July 23, 2007

It's a trifecta much bigger and rarer than an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. Only five people in history have ever won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel ... and Norman Borlaug.

Norman who? Few news organizations covered last week's Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for Borlaug, which was presided over by President Bush and the leadership of the House and Senate. An elderly agronomist doesn't make news, even when he is widely credited with saving the lives of 1 billion human beings worldwide, more than one in seven people on the planet.

Borlaug's success in feeding the world testifies to the difference a single person can make. But the obscurity of a man of such surpassing accomplishment is a reminder of our culture's surpassing superficiality.

The number of American Indians killed by a smallpox epidemic that originated in 1837 at Fort Clark, in present-day North Dakota, after the U.S. Army intentionally distributed infected blankets, according to Mr. Churchill, who cites Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles: At least 125,000

The number of American Indians actually killed by that smallpox outbreak, according to Mr. Thornton, who says the epidemic originated on a riverboat and was transmitted “perhaps by deckhands who unloaded merchandise, perhaps by chiefs who went aboard a few days later, or perhaps by women and children who went aboard at the same time”: At most 30,000

Bush is a vulgar Maoist:"Political power comes from the barrel of a gun," said Chairman Mao. But the surge is simply an endlessly repetitive reaction to the failure of the purely military.

University of Colorado Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill was fired this week after the university's Board of Regents approved my recommendation to dismiss him for academic fraud.

The ongoing drama now moves to state court, where Mr. Churchill has filed a lawsuit against the university alleging that it violated his First Amendment rights. Mr. Churchill drew considerable attention to himself in an essay that compared 9/11 victims to notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann.

While no action was taken by the university with regard to his views on 9/11, many complaints surfaced at the time about his scholarship from faculty around the country. The university had an obligation to investigate. The complaints led to the formation of three separate investigative panels -- which included more than 20 of his faculty peers and which worked for over two years -- to unanimously find a pattern of serious, deliberate and repeated research misconduct that fell below minimum standards of professional integrity.

The panels found that Mr. Churchill rewrote history to fit his own theories. When confronted, he asserted he was not responsible. According to one report,"Professor Churchill has, on more than one occasion, claimed that certain acts that appear to have been his were instead the responsibility of some other actor: his editor or publisher, his assistant, or his former wife and collaborator." The report goes on to note that"we have come to see these claims as emblems of a recurrent refusal to take responsibility for errors . . . and a willingness to blame others for his troubles."

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In all modesty, I know a thing or two about historical revisionism.

That summer she went to work at the most important radical law firm in America at that point: Truehaft, Walker and Bernstein in Oakland. They defended the Panthers. Two of their partners were members of the Communist Party—including Bob Truehaft, who was married to Jessica Mitford. I talked to Bob Truehaft not long before he died, and he said he was certain that Hillary came there because she subscribed to some of the kind of law they practiced and the kind of clients they defended. In her so-called autobiography, “Living History,” she put in a couple of sentences about living in Berkeley with Bill that summer and working at that law firm, but she makes it sound like their work focused on postal rate increases. There’s not a word about radicals.