THE RATIONAL ANIMAL WALK: "No cure for human," top columnist says!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2018

Warren sets out to prove it: In a new column concerning the Saudis, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman offers a key assessment.

"You can't fix stupid," the famous scrivener says.

Because "stupid" is seen as an insulting term, we'll rephrase what Friedman means. On balance, we'd say that the fellow means this:

In the end, you can't fix human. There's no known cure for that!

To evaluate Friedman's thoughts on the Saudis, you can read his piece. Concerning his larger assessment of us humans, we'll suggest that you consider what Elizabeth Warren just did.

Warren may be the most tone-deaf human ever to hold major office. On Monday, she released results of a genetic test which suggests that she had a Native American ancestor, somewhere between 6 and 10 generations back.

This means that, genetically speaking, Warren may be as much as one percent Native American! Or it may be more like one-tenth of one percent. Or maybe less than that!

A person has to be stunningly tone-deaf to think this speaks to the questions which have been raised about Warren's past claims to Cherokee ancestry. That said, in the best manner of The Age of Trump, Warren has adjusted for the sheer inanity of her statistical claim by adopting this grievance on behalf of her mother:

“Now the president likes to call my mother a liar. What do the facts say?”

Good God! Even in all his foolishness, Donald J. Trump hasn't been calling Warren's mother a liar. This wallowing in victimhood is the latest example of Friedman's extremely strong point:

We humans are irrepressibly dumb. There's simply no cure for us.

Rational animals, please! For all his lunacies, Donald J. Trump hasn't been calling Warren's mother a liar! On Monday's Tucker Carlson program, Fox viewers actually heard a clearer account of the actual state of play.

Carlson spoke with Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson. Even as we pitiful liberals were getting played by our "thought leaders," Fox viewers got to hear a clear account of the actual charge against Warren:

CARLSON (10/15/18): The Boston Globe told me a little while back that claiming to be the first non-white female Harvard Law School professor had no effect at all on her ascent within Harvard Law School. She didn't get any benefit from that. Is that true?

JACOBSON: Well, we don't know that because Harvard has never released her complete hiring file. What The Boston Globe had were documents Elizabeth Warren provided to her [UNINTELLIGIBLE], documents a few other people provided to, to them. But to my knowledge, and I specifically asked their reporter this question and never got an answer, her complete hiring file was never released.

So yes, there's—there may be nothing there. But does it really matter whether she benefited? She tried to benefit. She tried to get an advantage over other people by claiming a status to which she's not entitled. It's the worst form of cultural appropriation or misappropriation, which is a very hot topic in progressive circles.

She tried to misappropriate the identity of one of the most victimized people in history or, at least, in recent history, which is Native Americans—

CARLSON: It's a great point.

JACOBSON: —and progressives seem not to care.

Is that true? Did Warren try to benefit by identifying as Native American in the past?

Did Warren try to benefit? We have no idea! But that's the relevant, ongoing charge—and only the world's most tone-deaf rational animal would think this charge could be resolved by releasing data which says she may be one one-thousandth Native American, according to DNA.

The cluelessness there is astounding. And there's no known cure for this human trait—not even Over Here, within our deeply self-impressed liberal tribe.

How dumb does a person have to be to release those DNA results? How dumb, and how blindly self-righteous?

A person has to be deeply tone-deaf to address this matter this way. On CNN, that very same night, Kirsten Powers gave a much more sensible account of what Warren should have done.

Powers has long been sharper than the average cable news bear. Speaking to Anderson Cooper, she offered this perfectly sensible thought about what Warren should have done:

POWERS (10/15/18): The way this originally came up is, it came up during her Senate campaign, and it was actually unearthed by reporters. And she did mishandle it, and she's really gotten a lot of criticism since then and including today from Native American leaders and from indigenous people who are saying that she's misappropriating their heritage and that she—this DNA test actually doesn't prove that she's part Cherokee because that's actually a tribe, it's not something that a DNA test is going to prove.

So I think it would have been better if she would have just originally said, "You know what, family lore, this is what I thought. I made a mistake." You know, as Michael said, actually I don't think she probably has much more, you know, of this, you know, in her DNA than most Americans.

So just—you know, we all hear stories in our families and you say, "I heard it wrong." And she said something about her grandfather, great-grandfather having high cheek bones, which is a race stereotype. And so I think she actually has legitimately handled this badly.

This Monday, Warren specifically said that her DNA test didn't make her a Cherokee. (This will count as one of the most obvious statements any human has ever made.)

As of Monday evening, Powers didn't seem to be clear about this. But Powers has long been sharper than the average cable bear. She offered more good sound advice when Cooper asked about the timing of Warren's data dump:

COOPER: Obviously, she feels for her political future that she needs to address it. Is this the right time and the right way?

POWERS: No, it's a very strange time to bring it up, and I'm actually not sure that she did need to address it. I don't know that many Democratic voters or independent voters who weren't going to vote for her over this.

And like I said, if you're going to address it, there's another way to address it. Just say you made a mistake. Don't do a DNA test and tell everybody that you have, you know, this heritage that you don't have.

So, I mean, it's just kind of bizarre to me. It's like the DNA test actually didn't prove the point that she says that it's proving...

So I think that, you know, if I were her, I would have just admitted that I made a mistake in the first place. But, that's not something that politicians typically do. And so she's gotten herself kind of backed into this corner, and I think a lot of people are saying, "Oh, this wasn't so smart of her to do."

On CNN, Powers said Warren should have said that she simply messed up. She had believed an old family story, but she wasn't seeking advantage.

Meanwhile, over on Fox, viewers were getting an accurate account of the actual charge which remains against Warren. Stating the obvious, there's no way to prove, through that DNA test, that the actual charge isn't true.

Is the charge accurate? We have no idea! But on our own liberal channel, we were being told, this same night, about how racist racist racist racist Trump's attacks have been. Meanwhile, we were being told, by Warren herself, that Trump has been calling her mother a liar, a claim that's silly, dumb, stupid, untrue.

That silly claim is also quite human. Plainly, there's no current cure for that condition, certainly not at the highest ranks within our own failing tribe.

Our team had played the game this way for at least the past thirty years. This falls within the context of the sweeping claim which the international expert community is increasingly describing as "Aristotle's error."

All our reports this week are meant to be sung to the tune of The Baby Elephant Walk. "Rational animals" within our own tribe have helped put Trump in office.

Starting with the associate professors, our deeply benighted intellectual leaders just can't seem to curtail their highly destructive "rational" conduct. On balance, we in the rank and file are too human to see how this works.

Tomorrow: As usual, our pundits are shocked, just shocked