Posted on May 30, 2012

by

Daniel Clark

Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has been unable to substantiate her claim to being part Cherokee, a status she has apparently used to further her academic and professional careers. As if that weren't enough, she plagiarized two recipes that she submitted to an Indian-themed cookbook entitled Pow Wow Chow. So what does that make her? Just the latest in a long line of liberal Democrats, living a lie.

Heaven knows what the Cherokee have done to deserve the company of so many liberal liars. Colorado University professor and plagiarist Ward Churchill fraudulently claimed to be part Cherokee also. Less well remembered is the fact that President Clinton once claimed a Cherokee heritage, when he was speaking to a group of American Indians, and wanted to make them like him. Even Barack Obama, the International Man of Mystery, suggested in his book Dreams from My Father that he had some Cherokee ancestry on his mother's side. Good luck verifying that one.

It's not surprising that liberals would be so fond of this sort of embellishment. They're already so dishonest about who they are and what they believe that they bristle anytime someone actually calls them liberals, let alone socialists. By comparison, an invented Indian heritage is merely a little white lie, so to speak.

You could probably find isolated cases in which Republican politicians have fabricated their personal histories also, but among Democrats, it's standard operating procedure. As Glenn Beck recently chronicled on his radio show, very little of what President Obama has said about his past has ever been true. Perhaps the most egregious example is his claim that he is a product of the civil rights march in Selma.

He says that the outrage over Selma somehow or other inspired President Kennedy to start a scholarship program to bring students over from Africa. The recipient of one of those scholarships, the story goes, was Barack Obama Sr., who, after arriving in America, met a woman named Stanley Anne Dunham. "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks were willing to march across a bridge," he said. "So they got together, and Barack Obama Jr. was born."

While guiding us through Obama's Improbable History, he must gotten his wayback machine stuck in reverse, because there's no way these events could have unfolded in the order he described. The Bloody Sunday incident in Selma took place in 1965, when it triggered passage of the Voting Rights Act. This event supposedly "stirred the conscience" of John Kennedy, who had been assassinated in 1963, thereby resulting in the birth of Barack Jr., in 1961.

When it comes to autobiographical inventiveness, Obama is hardly alone among major figures in his party. John Kerry has often told of how he was secretly stationed in Cambodia in December of 1968, while being shot at by drunken South Vietnamese soldiers as they celebrated Christmas, but that President Nixon denied the existence of the mission. The only flaws in that story are that Kerry had never actually been in Cambodia, the Vietnamese don't tend to observe Christmas, and Nixon wasn't even inaugurated until a month later. Yet this "memory," he contends, is "seared -- seared -- in me."

One of Bill Clinton's most brilliant whoppers was that he has "vivid, painful memories" of racist church burnings in Arkansas, which never happened. Al Gore convinced himself that he and his wife Tipper were the inspiration for the novel and movie Love Story. Former New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson seemed as surprised as anyone to learn that he hadn't actually been drafted by the Kansas City Athletics, as he'd been telling people for decades.

Pandering lies and delusions of grandeur like these are characteristic of liberals, because liberalism is based on the proposition that the people need to be kept and cared for by their superiors. Thus, Democrat politicians have a peculiar motivation to render themselves superior, even if through imagined accomplishments and phony claims to moral authority.

The diversity racket has taught Warren that the shortest path to superiority is membership in a preferred minority group. So she checked a box on a form, published someone else's recipe, and, presto, instant Indian. If it doesn't pay off in November, that's only because she didn't lie big enough. She should have introduced herself as the Cherokee who invented the internet while playing center field for the Red Sox. Then, she could have gone to work printing those "Warren-Churchill 2016" bumper stickers.

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