The Patriot Post® · Churchill & Carlson

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/60078-churchill-and-carlson-2018-12-24

I’ve had Elizabeth Warren on my mind lately because she is said to be questioning her chances of garnering her party’s presidential nomination in 2020 because of the controversy over her ludicrous claim to be a Cherokee. She feels it has wrecked her chances of obtaining the support of minorities.

That would certainly set her back in spite of Deval Patrick’s dropping out of the race because, in spite of their playing coy about their intentions, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are definitely seeking the brass ring.

So far as Warren’s cultural appropriation goes, passing herself off as an Indian definitely got her a professorship at Harvard, where a premium is placed on certain minority groups; all of them in fact, except the Chinese.

Why anyone would be particularly invested in having a Cherokee represented on the faculty is something that only virtue-signaling ignoramuses who have managed to transform an Ivory Tower into an ivy-covered Tower of Babel can explain.

In any case, while pondering the mysterious success of Senator Warren, I suddenly flashed on another phony Indian, Ward Churchill.

As you may recall, the publicity junkie came to fame when he wrote an article in which he blamed America for the attack on 9/11, claiming that it was our foreign policy that had brought the chickens home to roost. In the piece, he referred to the victims as the “technocratic corps” who worked in the World Trade Center, labeling them “little Eichmann’s.”

Naturally, when the University of Colorado (Boulder), where his courses dealt with the mistreatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government, investigated him for fraudulent research (aka plagiarism), and concluded he was guilty and fired him, Churchill naturally accused them of punishing him for his intemperate remarks.

He sued the school for unlawful termination. Two years later, a Denver jury actually ruled in his favor, but only awarded him one dollar in damages. The university appealed the decision, and later that year, a District Court judge reversed the decision and returned the dollar to its proper owners.

Churchill then spent the next four years fighting and losing in one court after another. The farce ended in 2013, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

He fared no better when, at the age of 56, in 2003, he declared himself to be Creek and Muscogee on his father’s side, Cherokee on his mother’s. At various times, the percentages of his various ancestries changed. Sometimes he insisted he was one-eighth Creek and one-sixteenth Cherokee; other times, he claimed to be three-sixteenths Cherokee. But, he never quit identifying himself as an authentic Native American, even when the various tribes branded him a fraud.

In his defense, he said: “I never claimed to be goddamned Chief Sitting Bull!”

More like Chief Cock and Bull.


I happen to like Tucker Carlson, although, as I have mentioned, I could do without a lot of his stupid time-wasting guests, and I am getting a little tired of that phony laugh he adopts when someone like Richard Goodstein, Eric Swalwell, Chris Hahn, Ethan Bearman or Kathy Areu, says something extraordinarily dumb.

Still, I credit him with providing the likes of Mark Steyn, Heather MacDonald, Dan Bongino, Mollie Hemingway, Tammy Bruce, Jonathan Turley, Brit Hume, Mike Rowe, a megaphone on a somewhat regular basis.

I also appreciate the fact that he focuses on such matters as the border crisis, China’s villainy, the despots of Silicon Valley and the fraudulent nature of the Robert Mueller investigation.

But until Nancy Thorner called it to my attention, I had no idea he was so antithetical towards President Trump. But if we can assume that nothing was lost in translation, I found the interview he gave to the German-language weekly, Die Weltwoche, during a recent visit to Switzerland, exposed Carlson as a Never-Trumper in sheep’s clothing.

Urs Gehwiger, an editor with the weekly, opened the interview by asking Carlson what he thought about Trump’s first two years in office.

Carlson replied that he can’t stomach Trump’s self-aggrandizing and boasting. The truth is, neither can I. I also disapprove of Trump’s adultery and his often-boorish comments.

But I think that Carlson was way off base when in response to Gehwiger’s asking him if he thought Trump had kept his campaign promises, the usually verbose Carlson said, “No.”

When prompted by Gehwiger, Carlson expanded: “His chief promises were that he would build the wall, defund Planned Parenthood and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things,” and attributed Trump’s failures to “his inability to retain focus.”

He added that he didn’t think Congress or his agencies supported him. Well, duh, as we used to say in the fourth grade. But instead of laying the blame on Congress and those corrupt agencies, Carlson said: “It’s mainly Trump’s fault that he hasn’t achieved what he promised. He knows very little about the legislative process, hasn’t learned anything, hasn’t surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn’t done all the things you need to do.”

My reaction is that I’m surprised that Carlson, who generally supports Trump on his show, would wait until he was several thousand miles away from his desk to dump on the President. It strikes me as being as hypocritical as Barack Obama, who made it a practice to demean America whenever he was on foreign soil and trying to curry favor with those who shared his true feelings about this country.

It also seems stupidly myopic. For one thing, it’s not for want of trying that Trump hasn’t been able to carry through on those three particular promises.

It’s up to Congress to defund Planned Parenthood, just as it is up to Congress to finance the building of the border wall. Trump would have at least been able to repeal Obamacare if John McCain hadn’t crawled out of his sick bed and fly to Washington in order to cast the deciding vote against the repeal.

It is also short-sighted and mean of Carlson to ignore the other promises that Trump was able to keep, in some cases because he didn’t require Congress’s cooperation.

I refer to the cutting of business-killing EPA regulations; cutting federal taxes; moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; revising trade treaties; greenlighting oil pipelines; upgrading the military; pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal; defending religious rights; doing his best to improve the V.A.; seating two conservatives on the Supreme Court; and trying to seriously slow the flow of incoming Muslims before they have the opportunity to commit their usual mischief.

Frankly, unlike Carlson, I find it an impressive array of kept promises, especially in the wake of earlier broken promises by presidents who swore there would be no new taxes; that he had not had sex with a White House intern; and that if we liked our doctors and our health insurance, we could keep them both.

We can only hope that Tucker Carlson was temporarily discombobulated by a combination of Switzerland’s high altitude and perhaps a tad too much schnapps.