BREAKING: Did Candidate Warren ever believe that?

SATURDAY, MARCH 7, 2020

A look at the dogma rules: Judged by traditional, fairly sensible standards, we Democrats had a god-awful list of candidates to choose from this year.

Let's restrict ourselves to the less-than-Magnificent Seven who survived into, and even beyond, South Carolina. The rundown looks like this:

Way too old: By traditional, fairly sensible standards, two of the candidates were much too old.

One of the two seems to be losing cognitive power. The other one had a recent heart attack and won't release his medical records.

Way too young: One of the candidates was much too young, and was quite inexperienced.

Way too wealthy: Two of the candidates were billionaires who were on the debate stage for no other reason. They had bought their way onto the stage.

One of them had been a Republican for the past three hundred years. (He too was way too old.)

Lacking in charisma: One of the Candidates, Candidate Klobuchar, wasn't way too old or way too young. She also seemed to be thoroughly sane, and she serves in the Senate.

News flash! "White men" who fit the Klobuchar profile never get nominated either! As an example of what we mean, consider these candidates from this very campaign:

They too failed to emerge:
Jay Inslee, governor of Washington
Steve Bullock, governor of Montana
Michael Bennet, senator from Colorado
John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado

Those candidates didn't get as far as Klobuchar did. They weren't sufficiently well-known, and they lacked break-out charisma.

(What does break-out charisma look like? The stunningly talented AOC had it when she was just 28. So did Barack Obama.)

As you may have noticed, we've skipped one of the less-than-Magnificent Seven—Candidate Warren. In the past few days, the lamentations about her demise have been straight outta scenes from The Iliad in which wailing women watch sacred Hector die at Achilles' murderous hand in the plains outside Troy.

On the "intellectual leadership" level, has a political tribe ever been as scripted and dumb as our liberal team currently is? By any normal standard, Candidate Warren was a god-awful candidate too.

Today, we'll mention just one of the ways in which she was a nightmare waiting to happen.

Below, you see part of what Annie Linksey wrote in a front-page report in the Washington Post last December. Our request:

Try to step outside our existing tribal bubbles to see what this seems to mean:

LINSKEY (12/20/19): Warren identified herself professionally as a Native American at various points in her life. In April 1986, she listed her race as “American Indian” on her registration card for the State Bar of Texas, according to a copy of that document obtained by The Washington Post. She also listed herself as a minority from 1986 to 1994 in the Association of American Law Schools directory.

While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Warren had her race changed to Native American from white, university records show. Later, she requested that Harvard Law School list her as Native American after she was hired in 1995, according to the Boston Globe, which reviewed her personnel records.

Warren has said that she didn’t receive preferential hiring treatment because of her Native American claims, and an investigation by the Boston Globe confirmed that she was never viewed as a minority when hired at various law schools, despite being counted as a minority in diversity reports filed to the federal government by Penn and Harvard law schools as recently as 2004.

Her past claims have given Republicans openings to attack her character and honesty. To draw attention to the controversy, President Trump frequently refers to Warren as “Pocahontas,” which Warren and others say is a slur.

As Linskey notes, our tribe has (dumbly) waved this topic away, repeatedly saying that President Trump is sunk in "racist slurs." Before we consider the nature of those "slurs," let's try to consider the contents of Linskey's summary.

Here's what Linskey reported:

At least from 1986 through 1995, Candidate Warren repeatedly identified herself as an "American Indian," and/or as a "minority." She actively said that she wasn't "white," causing official records to be changed

She was still being listed as a "minority" through 2004. Is there any conceivable way she really believed such a thing?

Did Warren really believe that? Just this once, let's try to understand this peculiar history:

Warren didn't say that she had some degree of "Native American ancestry." She wasn't saying that, somewhere back on the family tree, there was one Native American.

That isn't what she kept saying. She kept saying that no, she wasn't "white"—she was actually "Native American," and therefore a "minority."

We'll ask our question again: Is there any conceivable way she ever could have believed that?

A second question follows. Are we really unable to understand the way this history looks?

Our tribe's "thought leaders" have persistently ducked these questions by shifting our focus to Trump. But are we really unable to see the way Warren's past conduct appears?

Our tribe has found a hundred ways to avoid asking these questions. As Linskey noted, we've often said that Warren "didn’t receive preferential hiring treatment because of her Native American claims."

That may or may not be true. But this dodge avoids an obvious fact:

Unless we're blinded by tribal dogma, it looks like Warren was trying to achieve a hiring advantage! Inevitably, it looks like she was trying to achieve an advantage by advancing these puzzling claims.

Would Trump have returned to his derisive "Pocahontas" taunts had Warren been nominated? We have no way of knowing.

That said, the appearance here is blindingly obvious. But because we're hopelessly sunk in tribal narratives and dogmas, our team has avoided this topic all through the primary campaign—with Trump likely waiting to pounce.

So how about it, team members? Do you believe that Elizabeth Warren ever thought she was Native American, not white? Can you find a plausible way to believe that she really believed that?

She wasn't white—she was Native American! Do you think she really believed that?

We'll leave the question of those "slurs" for another day. So too with the ridiculous way this reputedly brilliant candidate took that DNA test, then obscured the original question in the way she explained its results.

How dumb did this candidate have to be to stage that second-order charade? And yet, our "thoughts leaders" insist on trying to make us believe that she was The Smartest And Most brilliant By Far.

The outpouring of dogma is the past few days has been a deeply instructive sign of the times. Expert anthropologists explain the matter as follows:

When tribes lose confidence in their primacy, they tend to cling, even more strongly, to their narratives and their dogmas. So it has gone as our stunningly scripted "thought leaders" have tried to tell us that Candidate Warren was the brightest by far, and that her loss can only be explained by 1) sexism, and 2) the dumbness of the public.

We'll have more on this highly instructive outpouring in the week ahead. That said, riddle us this:

Did this seventh god-awful candidate ever believe she was Native American (not white)? Riddle the truth to us just this once:

Does that really make any sense?