Although this has temporarily dropped off the radar scope, the Ward Churchill affair has not exactly disappeared. His university is investigating claims of academic plagiarism made against him (in the academic world, plagiarism is one of the cardinal sins), various First Nations groups have alleged that Churchill is not really of American Indian descent, or is "insufficiently Indian", and Churchill himself continues to attempt to corner the role of the Pat Buchanan of left-leaning academia. It would be fair to say that he is so far not exactly repentant about his utterances in the aftermath of 9/11.
However, the Ward Churchill affair is more significant for what it says about the increasing intolerance of modern America. Here is a message I posted to The Well when the media feeding frenzy was at its peak a few weeks ago:

The whole Ward Churchill affair is fascinating...there are also some
parallels to another incident that Noam Chomsky became involved
in some years a go, when a tenured professor at one of the East Coast
universities was found to have written an article (in a private
capacity) where he showed himself to be a Holocaust denier. Needless to
say, the wrath of just about everybody descended on the professor,
with a sustained campaign being mounted to have him fired from the
university, hung drawn and quartered etc. Chomsky went along to a
meeting at the university called to protest the professor's tenure,
marched up to the podium, and said to the audience in as many words
"stop this nonsense immediately", explaining eloquently that you cannot
have degrees of free speech - you don't allow free speech only until
somebody says something you don't like. This was all shown on a British
TV documentary about Chomsky. As usual, Chomsky was utterly fearless,
totally blunt, and intellectually polished. The film showed him arguing
afterwards with a number of Jewish attendees, some of whom were trying
the "you're a disgrace to your religion" line on him - which he was
having none of, reminding them that they were arguing in favour of
driving a coach and horses through one of the fundamental tenets of
modern America, simply because the professor had written something
odious that they didn't like.
If Ward Churchill is going to be fired for academic fraud, then that I
could understand and accept, providing that a due process is followed.
What is not acceptable is for him to become a victim of a lynching simply because people don't like what he wrote, or don't like him as a person. That would represent the worst kind of ad hominem attack, and would undermine the concepts of freedom of speech and honest, rigorous examination of ideas and concepts that I thought universities were supposed to hold as core values.

I stand by my suspicion that the reaction to Ward Churchill's utterances tells us more about the hyper-sensitivities of modern America than it does about Ward Churchill.
Churchill is to academia what John Bolton is to international diplomacy, and the best reaction to Churchill's utterances ought to be polite disavowal, not mean-spirited attempts at a lynching.