Bloodthirsty Liberal

Jonah Goldberg notes perhaps the best defense of Elizabeth Warren that liberal orthodoxy can offer:

…The first poetic vision of Europeans in the new world was that of James Fenimore Cooper, who conjured Natty Bumpo. He had an “Indian name” — he had several: Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder — indicating that he had been “reborn” in the new world in the Indian spirit. It is the oldest and most important myth in the American canon of our folklore, from Lone Ranger, who died and became “born again” via agency of an Indian shaman, and Fox Mulder, who returned from the dead via Indian intercession in “The X Files,” born anew with the past burned away in death, to enter a new age under the flag of the White Buffalo.

So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.

Warren in that regard brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston where we still have tendencies. The James brothers, both William and Henry, would appreciate it. Henry in particular, in The Bostonians, could only find one worthy character up here, the country cousin Basil Ransom, a lawyer visiting from Mississippi. We are lucky to have Warren among us. She adds stock and substance.

I hope Mitt Romney remembers this and incorporates Indian blessings and ritual in his inaugural ceremonies as Canadians do and as they did in those terrific Winter Olympics in Salt Lake in 2002. And I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn’t back down on this, because wanting to be Indian, like Hawkeye, makes us in a deeper sense fully American.

Rush Limbaugh got in trouble for repeating—not coining, repeating—a phrase he read in the Los Angeles Times: “magic Negro”. (It was applied to Obama, but arises from an archetype in the liberal imagination that predates him.) Is the writer imagining a “magic Indian”? Is Betty Buckskin a “magic squaw”?

The “stock” that she trades is without “substance”. The closest her family came to real Indian blood is their spilling of it on the “Trail of Tears”. Even her recipes from Pow Wow Chow (imagine the howls of racial genocide if a Republican had come up with that title) are counterfeit—lifted word for word from that noted French nihilist and pastry chef, Pierre Frenay.

Liberals not only don’t acknowledge truth, they sweep it away like a cobweb. Bills don’t need to be passed (much less read), if they can be deemed passed. The Constitution doesn’t say what it says, it says what liberals feel it should say—and when it does not, it is dismissed as a “charter of negative liberties”.

And if the Nordic ice queen wants to imagine herself a sun-dried, wizened Hopi basket weaver, who the hell are any of us to say otherwise? Shame!

That she should feel shame is beyond dispute: her academic career is based on a lie.

That she feels no such thing is also beyond dispute: she clings to pride in a (miniscule) ethnic heritage that has no basis in fact, but only family “lore” and allegedly high cheekbones.

[If there were any validity to that last point, the lovely Olivia Wilde would be worshipped as an Apache princess.]

To paraphrase Buck, my neighbor’s jeep is more Cherokee than Betty Buckskin—but that’s never stopped her before:

Elizabeth Warren, the fake Indian, has another problem with the Pow Wow Chow cookbook.

It seems that at least two of her “special recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families” are identical to ones from The New York Times [NYT] that were printed in 1979.

And they’re not just from any eatery either — the recipes came from Le Pavillon, the fabulous French restaurant that dominated le haute cuisine in Manhattan from 1941 to 1966.

Amazing, too, that Granny’s recipes for Crab With Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing, and Cold Omelets With Crab Meat, while no doubt popular along the Trail of Tears, were likewise tres populaire with Le Pavillon’s Beautiful People clientele.

As Pierre Franey, the Pavillon chef and original author of the recipes put it, “The dish was a great favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.”

…

Granny’s 1984 Crab With Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing is a word-for-word recreation of Franey’s 1979 recipe. And I do mean, word for word.

As for Cold Omelets With Crab Meat, it’s more of the same.

Franey: “Use a small omelet pan or, preferably, a seven-inch Teflon pan.”

Warren: “Use a small omelet pan or, preferably, a seven-inch Teflon pan.”

Franey: “Heat about one-half teaspoon butter in the pan.”

Warren: “Heat about one-half teaspoon butter in the pan.”

A call to the Warren campaign seeking comment on the uncanny similarities between the two recipes was not returned.

There are also some questions about a third recipe, “Herbed Tomatoes.” That one includes a seldom-used phrase, “Add tomatoes cored-side down.”

We Googled that phrase and came upon part of a 1959 recipe from Better Homes & Gardens. By press time, we hadn’t found the actual recipe.

Plagiarism is nothing in politics—just ask Bill Ayers and Ted Sorenson. But it’s frowned upon in academia.

If she were to win, however, Warren would hardly be the biggest local embarrassment to Congress. Ted Kennedy drowned a woman; Barney Frank’s live-in lover ran a gay brothel out of their apartment; Gerry Studds (his real name, not his porn name) diddled male pages; and John Tierney’s wife laundered money for her fugitive brother—while Tierney himself claimed complete ignorance (entirely believable, given his voting record). Lie-a-Whoppuh is small potatoes au gratin compared to them.

Although I am beginning to feel sorry for her: it takes a lot to make an Indian cry, but they can sure feel sad:

PS: What’s Indian about mayonnaise?

You know, just a couple more thousand pages of legislation, and we may just get this health care thingy solved. (Lord knows, we don’t have to read it.)

Like countless rulers before and since, Diocletian discovered the hard way that price controls don’t work. They worsen the problem they are intended to solve, leading to shortages, rationing, and even higher prices.

Yet the belief that government can control inflation by fiat never seems to lose its allure.

Which brings us to the “Health Care Quality Improvement and Cost Reduction Act of 2012,” a 178-page bill introduced in the Massachusetts House this month amid jaunty predictions of cheaper insurance premiums for Bay State families and tens of billions of dollars in medical savings over the next 15 years. An even longer bill — 235 pages — has been introduced in the state Senate.

Remind me to write a bill called “The Tasty Sh*t Sandwich Act”. It will make more sense and be more achievable than this idiocy.

These bills aren’t written in Latin and they don’t impose the death penalty, but their core principle is not much different from Diocletian’s: The state knows best. What fraction of the local economy should health care consume? How fast should medical spending rise? On what business model should provider networks be organized? How should hospital and doctors fees be calculated? Where should consumers get information on quality and cost of care? When are a provider’s high rates justified? What penalty should it bear when they aren’t? In the world these plans envision, decision after decision comes not through the voluntary interplay of doctors, patients, hospitals, and insurers, but from government agents who impose them from above.

Adding up the “dizzying and expansive” array of decrees in the House legislation, health care analyst Joshua Archambault of the Pioneer Institute finds 941 instances in which the bill mandates that something “shall” be done. Among these are more than 25 kinds of penalties, fines, and surcharges, for price control and punishment always go hand in hand.

Looming over all would be a new Division of Health Care Cost and Quality, a command-and-control behemoth that would dominate the state’s medical and health-insurance landscapes, with the power to affect billions of dollars and millions of lives.

And what checks and balances would restrain this behemoth? In the language of the House bill, it “shall be an independent public entity not subject to the supervision and control of any other executive office, department, commission, board, bureau, agency or political subdivision.” Throw in a toga, and Diocletian would feel right at home.

It is a hallmark of liberalism that democracy must be legislated out of existence. The state will decide for you, and you’ll like it.

PS: Romney’s fault wasn’t to author such an abortion of a law that bears his name: he didn’t; the Democrat-dominated state legislature did. But he signed it, lent his name to it, and left Democrats in charge of implementing it. He deserves his share of blame.

We allowed her to overstay her visa for decades, turned a blind eye to her illegal contribution to her nephew’s campaign, and even gave her subsidized housing—against express regulations to the contrary. And when she got caught, we excused everything, as if her nephew himself had issued a blanket pardon.

No wonder she’s so sad:

Auntie Zeituni has written a book. It’s called “Tears of Abuse,” on account of how tough she’s had it.

Have I read it? Of course not. Have you read her nephew’s best-seller — Dreams from My Ghostwriter, I mean Father? No one has — it’s sold millions of copies, but until two weeks ago, not a single reader got far enough into it to learn that Obama was a dog-eater with “composite” girlfriends.

Anyway, I have the press release on “Tears of Abuse,” which describes Auntie Zeituni’s journey to the United States “where she faces the unthinkable; failing health and quarantined in a hospital while on vacation in a foreign country.”

Vacation? Surely she meant to say “welfare.”

“As her story unfolds she becomes a resident of (a) homeless shelter and a subject of deportation.”

How dare they! Just because she’s an illegal alien, they want to deport her.

Have they forgotten the immortal words of Marsha Coakley: “Technically it is not illegal to be illegal in Massachusetts.”

And if you don’t believe Marsha, just ask Uncle Omar, Auntie Zeituni’s brother, or half-brother, or whatever. Technically, it is also apparently not illegal to be driving drunk illegally in Massachusetts, at least if you’re an illegal alien.

“Quarantined” in a Massachusetts hospital? How many sick people around the world do you think would choose to be “quarantined” in this mecca for medical care? All of them, give or take, right? And how much, I wonder, did that set her back financially? Was she also under “house arrest” in the subsidized house she somehow received over other candidates, more legal, if not more worthy?

“‘Tears of Abuse’ reveals how this remarkable woman turns the unfathomable into triumph.”

Public housing, on the dole — what else would you call it but a triumph? The inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty needs to be rewritten. Forget the huddled masses yearning to “breathe free.” Now the huddled masses demand to “live free.”

Speaking of “the homeless, tempest-tost,” Uncle Omar gets his driver’s license back today. I hope nobody at the registry is even thinking of slapping that $100 license-restoration fee on this proud Kenyan illegal alien assistant manager of Conti’s Liquors in Framingham. That restoration fee is for U.S. citizens only.

Howie’s right, though. Democrats don’t have the habit of reading the actual documents they favor. ObamaCare, Dreams of Barack’s Father (Wm. Ayers, author), I, Zeituni—no one actually reads them. They just feel them. You provide the abuse, we provide the tears. It’s a win-win.

That’s not funny!

“I think what this is about is Scott Brown trying to change the subject,” said Warren at a Brighton event last night. “He just wants to find a way to talk about something else, and I think it’s wrong. I think this is why people are turned off on Washington politics.”

…

Paul Reed, a Utah genealogist who is a fellow at the American Genealogical Society, said he found primary documentation that shows Warren’s great-great-great grandfather Jonathan Crawford served in a Tennessee militia unit that rounded up Cherokees before they were force-marched to Oklahoma in the infamous “Trail of Tears.”

“Jonathan H. Crawford did serve in the Indian wars,” said Reed. “He is listed as serving in the company that rounded up Cherokees.”

Thousands of Native Americans died after they were forced to relocate under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Warren’s family link to the genocidal exodus was first reported yesterday by conservative websites Breitbart.com and Legalinsurrection.com.

Warren also brushed off Brown’s demand to release her law school and job applications.

“If Scott Brown has a question about my qualifications for my job, he can talk to the people who hired me,” Warren said. Citing Brown’s vote yesterday against a bill that would have prevented student loans from doubling, Warren said: “No wonder Scott Brown wants to change the subject. This is politics as usual.”

Two observations: if Betty Buckskin has a problem with any man, it’s her Injun-driving ancestor, not Scott Brown; also, Brown doesn’t need to go near this—let her hang herself, as she has been doing admirably, and twist slowly in the wind.

But for Annie Oakley to cry about beastly treatment by that… that… man is both a betrayal of what feminism should be, and a reaffirmation of what it has become.

Bonus observation: A Rasmussen poll shows the Paiute Pofesser still tied with Brown. Obviously, our electorate is that stupid, that dumb, deaf, and blind—what, Kennedy, Kerry, and Frank weren’t enough to convince you? But while I give great credence to Rasmussen polls, this one was of only 500 voters, and I think misses what would be an overwhelming lead for Brown among independents (locally, Unenrolled). While the Boston Glob’s coverage of this story has been spotty, actually defending Fauxcahantas in editorials, and hasn’t broken a single aspect of the tale of tears, everyone else is talking about it. If she were to win the election—a very real possibility, especially with Obama at the top of the ticket—we would be a national embarrassment. But then, see Kennedy, Kerry, and Frank note above.

PPS: I’ve held off for days, but I can hold off no more. If Betty Buckskin claimed Indian heritage on the basis of supposedly high cheekbones (don’t flatter yourself), can’t other ethnic connections be made on the basis of similar visual evidence?

PPPS: Don’t know why comments aren’t allowed on this post, and can’t find a way to change it. There are plenty of other Warren posts to comment on, however, so go crazy.

I feel I have only one consolation to offer Elizabeth Warren. Follow Nez Perce Chief Joseph’s advice and surrender: “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Throughout her career and political campaign, Elizabeth Warren has found victims everywhere she looked, including when she looked in the mirror and saw an alleged descendant of one of the most historically victimized groups, Native Americans.

In what may be the ultimate and cruelest irony, not only is it unlikely that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee, it turns out that Warren’s great-great-great grandfather was a member of a militia unit which participated in the round-up of the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears.

The evidence resulted from a tip provided by a Legal Insurrection reader to a genealogical compilation of militia members who allegedly participated in the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. The list included the name Jonathan Crawford, who was the husband of O.C. Sarah Smith, the person the Warren campaign has identified as Warren’s great-great-great grandmother and allegedly Cherokee.

Since confirming this genealogical information was outside my comfort zone, I forwarded the information to author and genealogist Michael Patrick Leahy, who already had written about and investigated Warren’s genealogy.

Leahy reaches the conclusion, based on a variety of sources, that Jonathan Crawford was indeed a member of the militia which rounded up Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears.

The Trail of Tears is Warren’s pathetic hapless campaign.

But consider her years of lying:

In the mid-1980?s through the mid-1990?s Elizabeth Warren filled out biographical forms for the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) identifying herself as Native American.

That self-designation was based solely on Warren’s family “lore” not genealogical research, and resulted in Warren being included on a list of “Minority Law Professors” in the AALS annual directory. That listing would have put Warren in a position to benefit from the desire of law schools to diversify their faculties.

Warren apparently did nothing else to follow up on her alleged heritage, such as seeking tribal membership or publicly identifying herself as Native American, even though she says her alleged Native American heritage was a frequent topic of family conversation.

When The Boston Herald discovered that Harvard Law School in 1996 was promoting Warren as Native American, Warren pleaded ignorance, and denied ever identifying as Native American in any professional capacity.

When law professor David Bernstein discovered the AALS annual directories, Warren then asserted that she listed herself that way in order to meet other Native Americans. That explanation made no sense since the AALS annual directories only list the category “minority,” not which minority. Warren also never has explained why she stopped listing herself as Native American in the AALS annual directory after joining Harvard Law.

Shortly after the controversy broke, the Warren campaign asserted that Warren’s great-great-great grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, may have been Cherokee based on an electronic index of a marriage license filled out by O.C. Sarah Smith’s son. That would make Warren 1/32 Cherokee, a notion which has formed the basis for Warren’s defense of her AALS listing, even though Warren was not aware of the 1/32 Cherokee connection until recently.

But further scrutiny caused that 1/32 connection to be called into question, since none of the source documents confirmed that O.C. Sarah Smith was Cherokee. According to Leahy, there is no credible evidence that O.C. Sarah Smith was Cherokee, and the best evidence is that O.C. Smith was at least partially of Swedish descent.

The entire episode has led to claims that Warren tried to game the system, to take flimsy family “lore” and spin it into minority status to help Warren in climbing the law school ladder all the way to Harvard Law School, which touted Warren’s Native American status at a time when it was under intense pressure to hire more minority law professors. To this day Harvard Law says it has a single Native American law professor, although it will not identify if Warren is that person.

It’s an utter massacre. At least Massachusetts Democrats will have a chance to elect a credible alternative to Crockagawea: vote what’s-her-name!

You know those annoying rubberneckers who slow traffic to gawk at the mangled wreck on the side of the road?

I think I understand them better now:

Shelly Lowe, executive director of Harvard University’s Native American Program (HUNAP), told Breitbart News today that U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had not, to her knowledge, participated in the program’s events while Warren was a professor at Harvard.

Last week, Warren explained that she had listed herself as Native American “in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.” However, she had not been involved in HUNAP, the most obvious avenue for meeting fellow Native American faculty and students.

Warren, who is the Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican Scott Brown, claims that she has a great-great-great-grandmother who was Cherokee. That claim has yet to be substantiated by evidence beyond family lore, and Warren herself has no formal tribal membership.

Are these other Harvard Hopi, these Ivy Iroquois, these Crimson Crow, also 97% white?

Doesn’t sound like it:

“The Harvard Powwow … is a great way to bring local tribes into the Harvard community, acknowledging the ancestral homelands, and show our heritage,” Cesar Alvarez ’13, the incoming president of Native Americans at Harvard College, told the Harvard Gazette.

…

The Warren campaign declined to comment yesterday, but the state GOP wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity.

“If Professor Warren were truly interested in meeting Native Americans at social gatherings as she claimed last week, then she would have attended this Harvard-sponsored event intended to bring Native Americans together, or any other event sponsored by the Harvard University Native American Program,” said party spokesgal Alleigh Marre. “The fact that Professor Warren apparently wasn’t interested in Native American activities on campus is another blow to her already-damaged credibility.”

That’s the real point, isn’t it? Her credibility. I am going to stipulate that her great-great (etc., etc.) grandwhatever was Cherokee. Or Delaware. Or Jersey Shore. If she checked a box on her various job applications over the years, she was just answering the questions that were asked. It’s bogus, sure, cynical to the extreme—it shows affirmative action for the complete fraud that it is. But that’s not all on her.

Her lies are. Her lame excuses. High cheekbones? Embarrassing, borderline racist. Identity lunches? Dear lord.

Hint, Betty Buckskin: a buffalo wrap contains no bison.

PS: If you ever find yourself in Boston and have some extra time on your hands, you could do worse than hop the Red Line to Harvard Square to take in some of Harvard University’s art museums. Like the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology—specifically, the Hall of the North American Indian.

My favorite exhibit:

PPS: If you know the Harvard campus—enormous though it may be—you might realize that the Law School is quite close to the Peabody:

See the Peabody in the upper right and the Law School Yard across the street? How hard would it be to nip over between teaching Consumer Protectionism 101 and Why Capitalism Sucks 301 for a little reconnection and reflection?

Sometimes, the best way to puncture the inflated ego and disturb the delusions of grandeur that infest the Left is to take one community and let it speak for itself.

Concord, Mass.: once home to Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau; now residence of Moonbat, Wackjob, and Trustafarian.

When Concord’s Town Meeting voted to ban the sale of bottled water Wednesday night, one of the ban’s supporters told her fellow Condordians, “We’re not gonna solve all the problems of the world, but this is our one chance to make a really huge statement to the world.”

And she’s right, they made a huge statement: “Hello, World! If you’re looking for the dumbest voters in the United States of America, you found us!”

The town of Concord — not state, county or even city — is waging war on the evil of convenient, easily-portable water by outlawing something many of its citizens now have in their refrigerators.

…

And so Concord voted 403-364 to make it illegal to sell bottled water. Uh, wait. That’s not right. You can still sell bottled water, it just has to be in larger bottles.

So it’s illegal to sell drinks in bottles smaller than 1 liter. No, that’s not it, either. You can still sell Mountain Dew or mango juice in small, plastic bottles. Just not water.

So the new law boils down to “It’s illegal to sell stuff we Concordians don’t like, and right now we don’t like bottled water … except when we buy it ourselves. So there.”

This was the secpond attempt. We reported on the first try, which was spearheaded by one lone zealot. Let this be a lesson: they never stop, the Marxists, they never give up. If they lose the battle, they prepare to win the war.

And when they win the battle, they pick another fight:

Looks like the Concord crazies are after more than just bottled water. They’re after your paycheck too.

At the tony suburb’s recent Town Meeting, a handful of residents passed a measure endorsing Rep. Cory Atkins’ effort to change state law to allow local governments to impose income taxes — on top of the state and federal income taxes we already pay.

Apparently not content to hurt their local grocery and convenience stores by sending shoppers elsewhere to buy Poland Springs, Concord do-gooders are now telling people to move elsewhere: to buy a house in Sudbury or Acton, not Concord.

Supporters of Atkins’ House Bill 3375 claim that the measure is necessary to reduce the burden of high property taxes.

Sound familiar? It should. Gov. Deval Patrick increased our state taxes allegedly for the purpose of lowering local property taxes. How’d that work out for us? Yeah, not so well.

But even taking supporters of the bill at their word — that revenues from local income taxes will be used only to lower property taxes — the bill makes no sense.

Substituting income taxes for even a portion of property taxes would have the perverse effect of lowering the tax burden on millionaires who live off investments and reside on large estates, while raising the tax burden on renters and younger workers supporting their families.

And yet, supporters of the measure actually have the audacity to argue that this is about “fairness.”

That wraps it up nicely, doesn’t it? Obama cites “fairness” when he wants to jack up the capital gains tax rate. Even when it’s pointed out to him that an overwhelming number of Americans make investment income, and that a lower rate actually increases return, he falls back on “fairness”.

I would advise us all to drown our sorrows, but you’d just have to take a swig from a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. That’s all that’s on offer.

I’ve told you that I’m trying to leave the Elizabeth Warren “Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe” story behind, but she won’t let me. I tried to convince you that this is a blog of ideas, not gotcha politics, but you know me too well.

Really, it’s like those wildlife programs on television. I just have to avert my eyes when the pride of lions sits down at the lunch counter of an antelope’s entrails. I know about “nature red in tooth and claw”; I just don’t have the stomach for it in politics.

But I’m glad others do. Here’s the king of the pride, the Simba of New Hampshire, Mark Steyn:

Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In Dreams from My Father, the world’s all-time most unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend: “When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough…”

…

Then there’s “Elizabeth,” a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack’s white girlfriend, she couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be a composite — a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface make-up and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the “Are you Native American?” box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F***kin’ Chief Dances with Plugs.

How does she know she’s a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather’s “high cheekbones,” and says the Indian stuff is part of her family “lore.” Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am,” and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as the Boston Herald reported, “Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the ’90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty’s lack of diversity.”

…

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have — hang on, let me get out my calculator — duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together.

…

Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

That’s enough. There’s really not much meat left on those bones. (But much more good stuff at the link!)

I really shouldn’t even feel sorry for her. The absurdity of her claiming Indian heritage—and of Harvard touting it—on the basis of family lore and (only moderately) high cheekbones is an insult to Native Americans, to diversity and worthy minority candidates, to our intelligence, and a whole lot more if I bothered to waste my time thinking about it. Had she stayed at Harvard, she would have maintained elite status; but she listened to the baser angels of her nature and thought she could take the Senate the way Sitting Bull took Little Bighorn. She learned different.

Oh yes she did:

Speaking to a reporter on a local news station in Boston, Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts cited her ancestor’s “high cheekbones” (quoting an aunt) as evidence of her Native American heritage.

I’m sorry, but isn’t that a wee bit racist? Certainly a stereotype. I tan pretty well, kind of a reddish brown. Does that make me Apache?

I would just as soon be done with the story, but she won’t leave it alone. She’s turned a minor embarrassment into a full-blown cluster[bleep]. And I thought Indians were wily and cunning.

I feel like Michael Corleone in Godfather III—just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in:

Fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, Elizabeth Warren said yesterday she enrolled as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to meet others with tribal roots.

“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am,” Warren said. “Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it, and so I stopped checking it off.”

The American Association of Law Schools directory, which administrators once used as a tip sheet to peg diversity hires, does not specify which minority group professors belong to. So it remained unclear yesterday how Warren, who listed herself in the directory from 1986 to 1995, used it to reach out to other Native American faculty.

She’s from Oklahoma, for pete’s sake! You telling me she can’t find another Indian—sorry, 1/32 Indian—in Okla-[bleeping]-homa? I’ve never been there, but it was Indian Territory until 1907; the place must still have a few dusty Cherokee hanging around. Give me a break.

She’s a lawyer; doesn’t she know better than to open lines of enquiry where you don’t know the outcome? Doesn’t she know better than to lie? I was done with this story—happily—but now I ain’t.

“The only one as I understand it who’s raising any question about whether or not I was qualified for my job is Scott Brown, and I think I am qualified and frankly I’m a little shocked to hear anybody raise a question about whether or not I’m qualified to hold a job teaching,” she said. “What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?”

Shame on you, Professor Buckskin. Sexism is the last refuge of scoundrels. Scott Brown didn’t claim to be Indian, you did: own it. Crying about his bestail behavior sets feminism back 50 years. (But as we’re beginning to discover, like so many letist -isms, feminism is a bogus, fraudulent concept.)

So may be her Indian-ism:

Warren’s latest statements came as genealogists at the New England Historic Genealogical Society were unable to back up earlier accounts that her great-great-great-grandmother is Cherokee. Warren’s ancestor, O.C. Sarah Smith, is listed on an electronic transcript of a 1894 marriage application as Cherokee. But as of yesterday, the society was unable to find the actual record or a photocopy, according to spokesman Tom Champoux.

All of which leads me to observe: how awesome is this?

Marisa DeFranco, a North Shore immigration lawyer whose financially strapped campaign is relying on a small band of passionate volunteers, has collected enough voter signatures to qualify for a primary race with Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

The unexpected development could complicate Warren’s much-ballyhooed challenge to Republican incumbent Scott Brown.

An official familiar with the signature process confirmed Wednesday that DeFranco has submitted to local election officials more than the 10,000 certified signatures required as a first step for her to appear on the Sept. 4 primary ballot.

Barring any serious problems with her nomination papers, DeFranco should also be able to clear the final hurdle to get her name on the primary ballot, winning enough support at next month’s Democratic state convention, according to party veterans.

Many political insiders had discounted DeFranco’s ability to collect the necessary signatures, pointing to the fact that she had little impact at the party caucuses in February where delegates were chosen for the June 2 convention.

They also note that she has only raised $41,613 in the past year and had just over $8,080 in her political account as of April 1. Warren, in an unprecedented fund-raising drive, has raised $15.6 million and has close to $11 million in her campaign account.

Under Democratic Party rules, DeFranco must get 15 percent of the delegate vote at the June convention to appear on the primary ballot. That task, though often a struggle for an underfinanced candidate, may be far easier than DeFranco faced in gathering signatures.

“If she doesn’t make the ballot it would be a very great surprise,” said John Walsh, the state Democratic Party chairman. Walsh said that delegates, impressed that DeFranco secured enough signatures, will feel that she deserves to compete in the party primary.

Of course she does. (And as far as I know, Ms. DeFranco does not claim to be descended from Christopher Columbus.) We reported at the time on Warren’s attempts to clear people off the primary ballot. We disapproved, and we’re glad to see the Democrats’ anti-democratic methods fail.

Good luck, Marisa!

Before we move on from this admitted non-story, can we just have a little more fun?

Please?

On the long list of “Stuff More Indian than Liz Warren” — which includes Indian pudding ice cream, 1/6th of the Village People and anyone who’s ever played professional baseball in Cleveland — you can add…

Me.

My grandfather Ray Futrell, a hard-drinking World War II vet and one of my life heroes, was also the grandson of a Cherokee Indian woman born in the Oklahoma territories. As a college student in Tulsa, Okla., I visited her daughter — my Great Grandma Fields — at the nursing home.

Which makes me the great-great-grandson of a Cherokee — a full generation less pale face than Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Aka: Faux-Cahontas.

I’ve known for a fact since I was a little boy that I was part Cherokee. I’ve even seen photos of my great-great-grandmother. But, unlike Princess “Rides In Limos” Warren, it never occurred to me to do what “Rides In Limos” Warren has done, and use my distant ethnic background to my advantage.

…

Like so many of my brave Cherokee brothers, I’ve suffered in silence at the hands of the white man. And without any casino revenue, either!

But there’s Liz Warren’s name — actually, her “oppressor’s name,” not her true Native one — in the list of minority law professors at the University of Texas in 1986. There it is again during her years at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995.

How did it get there?

Last week, Liz Warren’s campaign told the Boston Herald that they “flatly denied that she ever touted her Native American background professionally.”

But after being outed by a law professor’s blog over the weekend, her campaign was forced to admit “Warren had listed herself as a minority professor in the Association of American Law Schools desk book.”

…

What we do know is that once Chief IWannaGetOuttaOklahoma made it to Harvard, her name suddenly disappeared from the directory’s “minority faculty” list.

Harvard University continued to tout its minority hire, but not Professor Warren. What happened?

You’d think that the Great Spirit of the Occupods would want her Harvard followers to know about her ethnic heritage. Instead, “Slacker-Jawea” fell silent. Why?

…

[S]he had no problem talking about an unknown Indian ancestor from the 18th century, but she rarely speaks of her work as a litigator in 2009 on behalf of Traveler’s Insurance. She was paid $212,000 according to The Boston Globe-Democrat, for her work defending this “evil corporation” from asbestos-related lawsuits brought by blue-collar workers.

She was once proud of “creating much of the intellectual foundation” of the Occupy movement. Then their poll numbers sank, and she distanced herself from their clan.

People I know who know people who know people who know people at Harvard Law say Betty Buckskin is a perfectly nice person. And I’m sure that’s true—as nice as the “intellectual foundation” of the Occupy movement, enemy of capitalism, and serial self-aggrandizer can be. What the rest of the country may find bizarre, absurd, or offensive passes for normal around here. To borrow from her favorite Broadway musical, she’s just a girl who can’t say no. (—I’m not an Indian.)

But if we are indeed going to consign this story to the Happy Hunting Grounds of the blogosphere, we need Howie Carr to say the eulogy:

[O]nce she’d parlayed the racial-spoils racket all the way to a tenured position at Harvard Law, she decided to … pass, as they used to say in the old South. Once she’d reached the pinnacle of her trade, she ditched the fake-Indian routine. Maybe White Eyes Warren saw the smoke signals and figured out that someone was going to call her out on her ancestry. She was right.

Still, all’s well that ends well. She has her $1.7 million wigwam in Cambridge. Greedy Wall Street lawyers slurp top-shelf firewater at her $1,000-a-head Manhattan fundraisers. Maybe someday she’ll even smokum peace pipe with Tim Geithner.

But the greatest thing about this latest outbreak of Politically Correct hypocrisy is it shows just how morally and intellectually bankrupt “affirmative action” is.

The race card — like so many others, Barack Obama never leaves home without it. And a couple of weeks ago, he was reading off the Teleprompter that he (unlike, presumably, Mitt Romney) wasn’t “born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

Excuse me? What would you call a free pass to Columbia and then Harvard Law? For a guy who thinks there are 57 states and that they speak “Austrian” in Austria? Who pronounces corpsman “corpseman”? Who became editor [President? ed.] of the Harvard Law Review without ever having written a single article for the publication?

Who can forget Elizabeth Warren’s “rise from poverty.” That hasn’t been mentioned much since we found out that by 1965, her family had three cars, one of which was Granny’s white MG, a car that was, the Globe sadly informed us, “beat up.”

And you say Pocahontas Warren hasn’t got a right to sing the blues?

Then there was Granny’s $168,000 gig working for Travelers Insurance when they were trying to fend off lawsuits from victims of asbestos poisoning. Kind of like Deval Patrick being on the board of subprime monster Ameriquest, or Barack’s dealings with convicted racketeer Tony Rezko.

All of them, they’re better than you, because you’re an oppressor. They’re the oppressed — they went to Harvard Law.

Indeed it does re-prove the hypocrisy of affirmative action and the Left in general. But it’s still a non-story. This is such an overwhelmingly Democratic state, hypocrisy is seen as a positive trait. Scott Brown may well win reelection, but this train wreck of a personal embarrassment won’t derail Annie Oakley’s chances one bit. So, maybe it isn’t such a non-story.

Isn’t that right, Professor Warren?

Professor? Professor?