“After reading yet another article about University of Colorado nutjob Ward Churchill . . . ” says Kevin Drum, “I began to wonder. How did this story get so much play? I mean, the guy’s an obscure academic in Boulder, and the ‘Roosting Chickens’ paper that created all the flurry was written three years ago. What gives?” In a Washington Monthly commentary, Drum details a Nexis search he did on the story to see how it developed. After a few days of local reports, he says, ” On January 28 it led Bill O’Reilly‘s program. After telling his audience that free speech has its limits — ‘I can’t subject my audience to irresponsible ravings,’ he said, apparently without a trace of irony — O’Reilly declared that Churchill didn’t deserve to be an American citizen and then suggested that he should be arrested for sedition.” But it wasn’t until January 31, when The New York Times “devoted a thousand words to the controversy. At that point, a story that had been mostly confined to wire services, local media outlets in Syracuse and Colorado, and right wing provocateurs, went mainstream.” Drum reports that “Within the next three days stories appeared in the Seattle Times, Philadelphia Daily News, New York Sun, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Deseret Morning News, New York Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Kansas City Star, Detroit Free Press, CNN, NPR, and the CBS Evening News.” Says Drum, ” It’s fascinating how a trivial story like this managed to spread so far, isn’t it? The right wing machine pushed, the New York Times responded, and then the rest of the press followed.”

• RELATED: Hullabaloo’s editor Digby discusses the Drum piece and several others relating to Churchill in his own insightful commentary, but as for his own opinion, he says, “I realize that we soulless, decaying leftists are supposed to step up and repudiate him (or maybe tie him up and throw him in water to see if he floats) but I’m just too tired. Since I’d never heard of the guy before the right raised him to the status of leftwing icon I don’t really feel like I have much of a stake in his allegedly treasonous three year old book. Anyway, I’m still busy disavowing Jane Fonda and Joseph Stalin, my personal role models.”