Pierce: Elizabeth Warren Had to Engage With This Nonsense. That's What Our Politics Have Become.
Elizabeth Warren Had to Engage With This Nonsense. That's What Our Politics Have Become.
There was no better way to handle it.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
OCT 15, 2018
Yes, I am very sorry that our politics is in such a degraded state that it was even necessary for Senator Professor Warren to jump through this particular hoop. After all, the whole thing has been a buffoonish smear from the start, and it hasn't even been that much of a drawback to her political success. Scott Brown leaned heavily on the whole "fake Indian" thing in 2012, and all that did was make Senator McDreamy look like a dick. From The Boston Globe:
He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.” Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
This conforms to what's been told to me by practically every native-born Oklahoman I've ever met. But that's beside the point. If it had been me, I'd have told the president* to pound sand until he released his tax returns. This is further evidence that I never will be elected to anything, ever.
What makes SPW's announcement different is the video that comes with it. Not only does the video convincingly make the case that a) SPW had ancestors who were Native Americans and, b) that SPW did not depend on this to advance her career—something that the Globe had run down exhaustively in an earlier story—it also introduces her and her family to the public at large in a very shrewd and entertaining way. You get Momma and Daddy. You get her three big brothers talking about "Betsy." You get a nephew with a fabulous beard, and a family dog, snoozing away on the carpet. There are old family photos, being Ken Burns'ed at precise intervals.
At the same time, you get testimonial after testimonial about her gifts as a teacher. (When you have Charles Fried, who was Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General, and who is no flaming liberal, god knows, calling you "a tremendous teacher, an important scholar," you can't do much better as far as a bipartisan reference goes.) And the clearly political elements in the video, about how the president* uses Native Americans as a punchline, are more effective for having been grounded in her professional and personal story. The video reminds me of nothing more than it does that introductory video from Bernie Sanders's campaign in 2016, the one that used Paul Simon's "America" so effectively.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23787339/elizabeth-warren-dna-test-pocahontas-native-american-heritage/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Who me? I never said I'd give $1 million. 
Once again, facts reveal that everyone who believes Don the Con is a sucker.
If I were an artist, I'd draw a crowd of suckers with MAGA hats, with speech balloons coming in from the right containing quotes from the Dotard: "Only I can fix it!" "Build the wall!" "Chinese hoax!", etc.
It was so incredibly offensive and degrading. The Globe went on and on and on about how Senator Warren did NOT use her Native American heritage to give her an advantage at any point in her career. It was the result of hours and hours of examining detailed records. Why was it necessary???
All I could think of was of all the wealthy white privileged males who toddle off automatically to places like Harvard and Yale (Hello, Brett Kavanaugh and Dubya) just because well, they are wealthy, white, and seriously connected. They are ALL there on merit ... like Jared Kushner. 
No one questions if any of THEM got any "special" treatment or advantages. That is saved for a woman who had to work her a$$ off at every step of her career.
What if Globe reporters had spent all those resources on investigating some of the ongoing corruption that is daily life in Trumpistan? The mind boggles.
... who can dig up old records on these guys.
Let's see their SAT scores, their college transcripts, the "permanent records" of all the trouble they got into in college. I'm sure Harvard has old filing cabinets in the administration building's basement that have the scoop on these guys. In the case of Trump it would be University of Pennsylvania where he probably never graduated. I'll bet his Daddy bought his degree with a huge donation to the school.
