As If The Right Wing Has Not Had To Endure Enough, Now the Jury System Bites Them In The Butt

Lynne Cheney must be home banging her head against the wall. First she finds out that all but a very few of the men her hubby has been keeping in Gitmo are innocent after all. Now the culture wars have been set back a century or so by a Denver jury, in a recent ruling that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was wrongfully terminated.

It is amazing to me (and makes me all teary about the Constitution) that juries often really get the nuances of a thing. Churchill was awarded attorney's fees, but only $1 in damages because of the plagiarism charges that arose in midst of the controversy. Churchill did appropriate someone else's work: there is no doubt about that. But the reason he was summarily fired, the jury argued, was because of political speech that was unpalatable to the governor of Colorado and the Colorado legislature. And that, they agreed, was wrong.

Satisfactory all around if you ask me. And just in case you think the Radical is a big Ward Churchill fan, guess again: you don't have to talk to too many Native Americanists to figure out what a thorn he is in the side of the field.

However, I am a big fan of due process, thank you very much. And by the way: I wouldn't have called all those Wall Streeters Nazis after 9/11 either. It was mean and factually incorrect besides. But I must say, popular attitudes toward the New York money people have changed eight years later, haven't they?

Hat Tip.

Politics Today: A New Feature on Tenured Radical

I am toying with thematic formats that will allow me to blog in a more moderate way on a few days of the week -- rather than devoting half a day to a blog post, or swear off blogging entirely so that I can get a chunk of work done before lunch. Moderation is what the Radical strives for, at least in some things. The truth is, part of my problem is that I begin the day by reading the New York Times, reading everyone else's blogs, and doing my email -- which transports me, mentally and intellectually, about as far from the nineteenth century and Civil War historians as I could be transported. It can take a while to get back, believe me, when my head is swirling with political scandal, academic gossip, wicked humor from my mostly pseudonymous colleagues, and the current plight of the Philadelphia Phillies.

But this morning I received a terrific video from a friend. I have tried to upload it here and failed (so do not click on the image and expect anything to happen) -- due to some combination of my technical inability and the fact that it would violate copyright six ways to Sunday. It is Walt Handelsman, the Pulitizer Prize-winning New York Newsday cartoonist, commenting on the political style of Nanny Dick:



Click here to view the video legally. Oh yes -- and Handelsman does comment on the archives question.

Could he be reading the Radical?

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For more political news of interest to historians in today's New York Times, see Enid Nemy's wonderful obituary of Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson, otherwise known as Lady Bird because she was "purty as a lady bird." For the real skinny on the Johnson marriage, and what Lady Bird actually put up with from the man who co-directed the last unwinnable war, you must go to Robert Caro's wonderful, readable, now three-volume biography of LBJ. In today's Times you can also read the latest on the transfer of the Nixon Presidential Library to NARA, including descriptions of eleven more hours of White House tapes released by our heroes, the archivists.

Oh for the days that President's taped themselves! Does anyone but me wonder who the first blogging President will be?

The Perils of Nanny Dick: An Update on the Bush Administration Archive

According to the New York Times, Dick Cheney's office has consistently resisted any oversight of how his office handles classified materials: you can read about it here. That oversight normally comes from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), an agency that was established because of the advocacy of the American Historical Association in the last century. But here's the beautiful part: when the NARA office that deals with the preservation of classified records persisted in its attempt to do its job under the 1978 Presidential Records Act, Cheney shifted tactics from simple obstruction and tried to get the office itself abolished.

These. Bush. People. Are. So. Awful. And the mystery is -- why didn't they think they would ever get caught at this? Or did they think they might get caught, but they would have so effectively gutted the justice system by that time that none of their lying, filthy deeds would be prosecuted? And I have to tell you, it is one thing to go after prosecutors, but going after archivists is low. Not even Richard Nixon went after archivists.

History News Network has a post up that is a summary of today's New York Times article: you can see it here. But once again, I wonder why -- along with Gayprof, in a comment on a previous post -- the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians has been sitting on their collective hands? True, in March, the AHA urged all of us to write our congresspeople to support a bill reversing Executive Order 13233, W.'s original move against the historians. But I see nothing on the AHA's advocacy page about the hearings currently being held by Henry Waxman (D-California); to look at the scope of the Waxman investigation and why it should concern us as scholars and citizens, you need only go to the webpage of the Committee on Governmental Oversight. And I have received nothing from either of these professional organizations to which I pay hefty annual memberships (OK, because of size I am not counting the Southern and the Berkshire Conference, and I am letting the Historical Society, to which I do not belong, off the hook too) alerting me to the issues at hand and what we, as historians, might do to be heard in this matter. And, as Gayprof pointed out in a comment on a previous post, why are we six years into this Administration and this has not been a major professional organizing issue for American historians and our colleagues in other fields?

What gives? Make a difference here, bloggers. To write Representative Henry Waxman, either to express your personal concern or to bring in expert testimony from historians, go to this link. To contact Arnita Jones, Executive Director of the American Historical Association, click here (don't worry: this is not her personal email.)

The Tenured Radical Has a Virtual Crush On.....

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. OK, regular readers of this blog know that the Radical doesn't do men, so this is a *political* crush. For those of you who remember the early stages of second wave feminism, this is a lot like being a Political Lesbian. Which I am not. I am an actual lesbian.

Anyway!

If you have been following the political news, you know that Congress is going to vote on a war funding bill today, and you also know *why* I am utterly crushed out on Harry Reid. I was pretty fond of him before, having been partly raised in Idaho, which allows me to utterly relate to his grim Western mentalite better than many of my New England friends do (the ones who expect peppy, charming Senators like John Kerry.) But yesterday, after Nanny Dick blasted him in front of the press right outside his own door, Harry came running out and said: "The president sends out his attack dogs often, also known as Dick Cheney, and he was here again today attacking not only me, but the Democratic Caucus."

Isn't that cool? I bet it drove Nanny Dick to use the f-word as he retreated down the hall, like he did on the Senate floor.

This would be Bowzer here on the left, a picture taken outside Reid's office as the vice president was accusing the Dems of opposing the war, not out of principle or intelligence, but to win seats in the next election. And who is standing behind Bowzer? That would be Republican Senator Trent Lott, whose speeches before white supremacist groups in decades not-so-past, and his birthday speech for Strom Thurmond, were probably *not* for cynical political gain, otherwise surely the Republican party would insist on another Senator from the Great State of Mississippi who did not seem to be a big old racist.