The other day I was sitting down for a bowl of leftover Pow Wow Chow when Rachel Dolezal crossed my mind. How weird was that? Both Dolezal’s story and the fact that it crossed my mind. A white girl that grew up, decided to adopt a completely different racial identity from her own, and in doing so went on to head up the Spokane branch office of the NAACP. Lifetime network movies aren’t this twisted.
I’ve never been to Spokane but always figured it would a nice place to visit. Was Rachel so hard up trying to find stuff to do in eastern Washington that she decided to become a black woman? Why a black woman? For all the whining about white privilege and black lives matter, why did Dolezal deliberately choose to identify as a member of an allegedly victimized race? She ought to have said she was as white and pure as the driven snow. Did she do it to get a faculty job at an elite Ivy League school?
Hold on, that wasn’t Rachel Dolezal. Elizabeth Warren was the one that said she was 1/36th Cherokee or some such in order to get hired by Harvard. Hence her recipe collection “Pow Wow Chow” in which she didn’t just borrow an ethnic identity different from her own, she plagiarized recipes that weren’t hers to begin with. Elizabeth Ann Herring (her birth name) needed a little ethno-cred to make it in progressive circles. At least she was smart enough to realize nobody would believe it if she said she was black.
There’s a little bit of Michael Scott in the lack of liberal embarrassment over Dolezal and Warren’s salad bar-style approach to racial identity.
Warren’s name is once again on the lips of progressives desperate to find a woman suitable for replacing Hillary as head of their Presidential ticket. In social media, it’s not hard to find “Warren/Sanders 2016” memes. Wikipedia has cleaned up their Elizabeth Warren web page too, removing any mention of her extensive and controversial relationship with Wall Street.
Things like her ties to Michael Masters. The way Warren worked it, she pushed for the financial reforms hedge fund investor Michael Masters needed. He made money off of it by investing millions in companies adversely affected by those reforms. As the fiscal impact of regulations began to roost, Michael sold his shares in those companies short. By doing so, he made a fortune while simultaneously devaluing otherwise sound companies. Washington think-tank Better Markets provided the organizational bridge between Warren’s Senate office and Masters.
Like Warren once said, “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own”. Spoken as clearly as any Chairwoman of a Congressional Oversight Panel managing the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) with a crony like Michael Masters could say.
Warren’s complete statement on the topic was:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect you against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But a part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
It’s Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” on steroids. Unlike Pow Wow Chow, she didn’t plagiarize Obama – he made his comment after Warren made hers. Her comment hints at an ideology that is to the left of Barack’s.
Yet not a single liberal finds it hypocritical that the same Elizabeth Warren out there rebuking capitalism is the same Elizabeth Warren working hand in glove with hedge fund investor Michael Masters to make millions while damaging companies that employ Americans.
A January 29, 2016 Elizabeth Warren Op-Ed piece in the New York Times entitled “One Way to Rebuild our Institutions” appears in part to have sparked interest in “Warren/Sanders 2016”. The part everyone’s focused on is near the end where she says “nobody is above the law”. However, the piece taken as a whole is a doozy. A big government orgy. An executive action love-fest. Keep in mind, Warren is a member of Congress as she writes:
“…voters should also consider what Presidents can do without Congress. Agency rules, executive actions and decisions about how vigorously to enforce certain laws will have an impact on every American, without a single new bill introduced in Congress”.
“The Obama administration has a substantial track record on agency rules and executive actions…these accomplishments matter”.
“To be fair, weak enforcement is sometimes the result of limited authority”.
“…voters should also ask which Presidential candidates they trust with the extraordinary power to choose who will fight on the front lines to enforce the laws”.
In between these things she falls all over herself fantasizing about what government could have done in various cases if her idea of the right people were in charge of executive agencies. As Warren says, “personnel is policy”.
Or in other words: Executive actions are great. Who needs checks and balances when there’s a progressive agenda to push forward. And anyway, the key to a truly empowered nanny state isn’t just executive actions, it’s making sure the next head of the EPA, SEC, EDMC, FRA, and any number of other executive agencies are goose-stepping in unison with the far left’s statist agenda. That way the agenda is institutionalized and the vast body of administrative law already on the books can further Democratic Party goals.
It’s precisely this mentality that has the Warren/Sanders 2016-crowd erecting shrines to Gaia and sacrificing globs of tofu in hopes that Elizabeth Warren will change her mind, move Sanders to the Veep slot, and run against the GOP.
The pro-choice, question-authority, let-me-be-me left is perfectly content to conjoin themselves to an agenda disrespectful of options and opinions, absolute in it’s exercise of authority, and demanding of conformity. Liberals are essentially walking, talking red herrings they’ve misled themselves for so long.
It’s a good thing Elizabeth Ann Herring decided to keep her first husband’s name after their 1978 divorce. Elizabeth the red Herring has a nice ring to it.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/13906218886/