Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential Run Reveals Mass. Senator as Serial Liar
Press Gives Senator Pass on Lies About Sanders and Other Feats of Opportunistic Rhetorical Prestidigitation — Opinion
Elizabeth Warren’s moment of truth arrives today, Super Tuesday, as her own adopted home, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, goes to the polls and pronounces sentence on the former Harvard Law prof’s presidential proffer. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, arguably the premier online aggregator of polling data, the Bay State will be won by Bernie Sanders, with Warren coming in second or possibly third.
If Warren fails to win, her campaign is not necessarily over, though on Wednesday, Match 4th, the 87th anniversary of the first of four presidential inaugurations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the senior senator from Massachusetts’s chances at obtaining the Democratic nomination will crater at a level approaching less than zero, not much different than her odds today, Super Tuesday. For Elizabeth Warren seems to have been cast in a role by the media, and the Democratic Party Establishment:
To siphon progressive votes away from Bernie Sanders.
And to provide the high drama that makes for high TV ratings on cable TV, which suffers from anemic ratings and lousy advertising rates.
Blood Affinities Whilst Drawing Blood
Senator Warren has benefitted from the advertising driven media’s reluctance to question what has been plainly revealed during her presidential bid: That the formerly Republican supporter of President Gerald Ford while employed by the Oklahoma Law School morphed into ultra-liberal Person of Color when transplanted to the banks of the Charles River at Harvard Law in Cambridge, Mass. is, apparently, a serial liar. Politico reported that she did not change her voter registration from the GOP to the Democratic Party until she was 47 years old, in 1997, while at Harvard Law.
For in addition to the shameful decades-long “Red Face” Act in which she claimed that she is a Native American by blood — a startling act of fraudulent cultural appropriation that should have sunk any aspirant to the Democratic presidential nomination but did not — she also has lied about being fired from a teaching job for being pregnant.
Elizabeth Warren’s assertions that she is a member of the working class by blood since her father was a janitor also was revealed as a lie by her own brother, one of the two she constantly evokes on the campaign trail during her shill to voters. That Warren lied about this has been ignored by most of the press — Microsoft News took down its video about it and only conservative media like the Washington Examiner and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze covered it.
The mainstream advertising-driven press just doesn’t care. It has cast Elizabeth Warren in a central role in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Reality TV Show that needs good ratings to produce a healthy revenue stream from advertising: She is there to draw blood and votes away from Bernie Sanders.
Warren + CNN Attack on Sanders
In what apparently was a coordinated attack on Bernie Sanders by CNN and Elizabeth Warren, CNN ran an article on January 13, 2020 entitled “Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private 2018 meeting that a woman can’t win, sources say.” Sanders denied the charge, calling it “ludicrous.”
The article came out before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. More importantly, it came out the night before the critical Democratic presidential debate that was to be held on CNN.
CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip used this breaking news story to hit Bernie Sanders the night of the debate and support Elizabeth Warren by framing questions to the two candidates, by assuming the allegations that came from Warren’s own staffers were true and unbiased.
Despite everyone knowing that Bernie Sanders had denied the allegation, Phillip said to Sanders, “Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”Despite everyone knowing that Bernie Sanders had denied the allegation, Phillip said to Sanders, “Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”
Sanders had to again deny the charge. “Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say that.”
Bernie then went on to explain, “Anybody that knows me knows that it is incomprehensible that I would think that a woman couldn’t be president of the United States…. In 2015, I deferred in fact, to Senator Warren. There was a movement to draft Warren to run for President. And you know, in fact, I stayed back. Senator Warren decided not to run and I did run afterwards.
Sanders went on to say, “Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become president of the United States?”
Phillip continued to press the set-up. “ So Senator Sanders — Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?”
“That is correct,” he replied.
Unbelievably, Philip then showed her bias towards Warren by asking her, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”
Elizabeth Warren played along with this farce, the most naked example of political bias presented during a Democratic presidential debate, ever. She kept a straight face, an impassive face, while the attack was launched, before saying her lines in this scripted reality TV drama.
“I disagreed,” she said, with the impassive face of the political hitman. “Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie. But, look, this question about whether or not a woman can be president has been raised, and it’s time for us to attack it head-on.”
The bias of CNN even extended to the title of its own YouTube clip of the attack on Bernie,
This was a scripted drama, and many people were right to think that Donald Trump was not the only party in the “Fake News” give-and-take that dealt in fantasy and lies.
Drama Queens
Elizabeth Warren, the political TV reality show star, has paid off for the TV networks, most notably in the Las Vegas debate. The New York Times declared Warren the decisive winner of that debate. It was the highest rated Democratic presidential debate in history.
It is difficult to find the cost of an advertisement on the presidential debates charged by the networks, but according to Variety in its July 24, 2019 issue, CNN charged $110,000 per 30-minute segment, with a minimum commitment of $300,000. That is boost of approximately 9 to 16 times over CNN’s normal prime time rate of between $7,000 and $12,000 per 30 seconds.
The conflict generated by Elizabeth Warren makes good TV, and good TV generates good ratings, and good ratings generate more income from ads. Warren’s apparently sharklike propensity to do what it takes to win the nomination, including a proclivity to engage in rhetorical prestidigitation, is a TV advertisers dream, and a wet dream for those flogging TV advertising spots, as CNN, MSNBC, etc.
Reality TV star Donald Trump was a gold mine for the cable networks in 2016. Ratings for the Republican presidential debates were astronomical, the highest in history. The presidential debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton also were big moneymakers, as they roped in the viewers. The Clinton-Trump debates were ratings record-breakers! Boffo Box Office, as Variety might have put it in a headline about a movie in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Television, like he movies, makes performers like Donald Trump into stars, and the stars, in turn, make the medium —stars not only boost their medium platform’s relevancy and stature, the stars make the medium money.
Elizabeth Warren is a potential moneymaker for cable television, not as a star, but as a featured player, on the lines of say Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Seinfeld. Jerry Steinfeld might have faded away and be doing weekend open mic nights in Long Island today, without the stellar supporting cast of Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards. (Pete Buttigieg was in this class, with Joe Biden falling somewhere in the line of Jerry Stiller’s Frank Costanza.) And then there’s Larry David….
Larry David, meet Bernie Sanders. That was the essence of the Warren-CNN “hit” on Bernie.
As Curb Your Enthusiasm proved Larry David proved himself to be the true motivating genius on Seinfeld (as did the dreadful David-less last season of Seinfeld), Bernie Sanders has emerged from the Hillary Clinton headlining 2016 Democratic Presidential Sweepstakes as the Superstar of 2020. The immolation of Drama Queen Clinton — her 2016 Box Office Bust — birthed the Drama Queen Donald Trump, the ratings champ of 2015 through 2019, inclusive. It’s a record — #1 box office star five years in a row — only equaled by Bing Crosby and Burt Reynolds.
It is a verity of verities that conflict drives drama, and since the time of the ancient Greeks, great drama puts “fannies in seats” (as New York Yankees owner and Drama Queen George “The Boss” Steinbrenner famously said about his personal pet Drama Queen, Billy Martin, who he hired and fired five times in a real-life soap opera.
Mirroring Trump
Elizabeth Warren’s claim that her fellow Senator Bernie Sanders told her in a private one-on-one meeting that a woman cannot be elected president was merely the biggest example of her mendacity. Her 2020 presidential run has revealed that the senior Senator from Massachusetts is a serial liar. In that, she proved to be the left’s mirror of Donald Trump.
Warren had to retract her claims of being descended from the indigenous peoples of North America.
Warren’s claim that she was fired from a teaching job for being pregnant was revealed to a falsehood.
Warren’s story about her father was a janitor was rebutted by her own brother.
Her coordinated attack, with CNN, actually precipitated a surge towards Bernie.
A political boss once told me that all politicians lie. Like parents dealing with children (“Do what I say, not what I do”) and young husbands sneaking back home late (“I had to work late and the car wouldn’t start), the politician to be elected and survive must master the white lie.
If fibbing isn’t part of a politician’s DNA when they are elected, gene expression will soon imprint it into every cell of the professional pol’s body, for them to survive.
Overt lies that break the faith, particularly those between politicians, when one betrays the other, are the big NO! NO! among the professional pols. Mostly, that means pledging yourself to a stance right up until the moment of the vote, when you change your vote when some offstage marionettist pulls the pol’s strings
The public is there to be bamboozled, more or less, just like the audience of advertising revenue-driven TV. But there is supposed to be honor among thieves. For one political gangsta to betray another is taboo.
However, taboos are there to be transgressed against.
My first interview with a presidential candidate was back in 1980, with I got to ask one question to then-California Governor Jerry Brown, visiting Boston during his quixotic presidential bid. I was a student at Boston University with Howard Zinn, and Howard loved to give his students projects, and mine was to support the United Farmworkers, who were on strike again.
“Do you support the UFW’s bid for a new contract,” I shouted to Governor Brown. He turned his face towards me, and I thought of Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor. I was a Protestant and here was Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition in the flesh! That hawklike face, the burning eyes of a true believer. The sheer driven humorlessness of a man who was thought of as a likely president in 1988, or 1992….
“Yes,” he said. The interview was over.
I only met Bernie once. Bernie had all the intensity of Jerry Brown back in 1980. My attempt to talk to him during the 2016 New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention didn’t go well, as somebody had heckled him for not being a Democrat before my brief encounter with Bernie, and I did not feel the burn. I only got the chance to say “Hello!” and then he had to move on.
I had first heard of him in 1974, when he was running for governor of Vermont. My father was living in Burlington, and somebody from a third party delivered a handbill for him to the house. That he was an avowed socialist was refreshing in those times, or any time in America, as every industrialized country in the world had a socialist party, such as the pre-Blair Labour Party in the UK, but not the United States.
My first New Hampshire primary I remember, as an observer, was 1968. I was eight years old and Paul Newman came to the house across the street, to thump the tub for Gene McCarthy. The first New Hampshire Primary I participated in was 1976, when I volunteered for Senator Birch Bayh, a great liberal who was running along with the liberals Congressman Mo Udall and Teddy Kennedy stand-in Sargent Shriver, which allowed the conservative Jimmy Carter to come in first. As a freelancer, I covered the 2008, 2012 and 2016 New Hampshire primaries.
Bernie Sanders is, by far, the politician that lies the least. In fact, I can’t think of a white lie from Bernie.
He was playing a little loose attacking Hillary Clinton over the Omnibus Crime Bill that he himself had voted for, but at the time he voted for it, he expressed his discomfort with the bill. At one point during the 2016 primaries, Hillary attacked him for not supporting Hillarycare back during Bill’s first administration. That attack backfired and made her seem foolish when Bernie released a photo of Hillary and himself with a gushing inscription from the then-First Lady, thanking him for his support of her attempt to overhaul the healthcare system!
There’s fibbing and the manipulation of perceptions, but there’s a line that a politician crosses
Senator Warren’s penchant for lying is unfortunate, in that one of the main digs against the man the Democratic presidential nominee will go up against, Donald Trump, is that he is a serial liar. Like the serial sexual harasser-enabling Hillary Clinton taking the stage with a former Miss Universe who claimed Trump sexually harassed her at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, The Clinton’s impeachment-inducing sins negated a good deal of the power of the moral indictment of Trump.
Like Trump, who was a long-term Democrat and FOB (Friend of Bill) who partied with Bill Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas prior to the 1993 inauguration (his wife Ivanka left to roll through Little Rock in a limousine as her hubby was absent, partying with Bill), Elizabeth Warren was a master self-interested political self-reeducation. A moderate Republican and supporter of President Gerald Ford, Professor Warren reinvented herself as a liberal Democrat when she moved from the University of Oklahoma Law School to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
At Harvard Law, she did a “red face” act, impersonating a Native American, which enabled Harvard to tout her as a minority professor at a time when the Law School lacked minority professors. Harvard Law was being sued by minorities, including Native Americans, over its lack of diversity while Warren did her redface act, providing Harvard with cover from charges of racism.
In her book and in her campaign speeches, Elizabeth Warren has portrayed herself as the victim of sex discrimination, claiming she was fired from a teaching job for being pregnant. In fact, transcripts of the School Board revealed she was offered an extension of her contact.
Elizabeth Warren lied.
After re-inventing herself as a Bay State liberal, Warren decided to tack hard to the left in her pursuit of the 2020 presidential nomination, and take over Bernie Sanders lifelong agenda. Responding to criticism from Bernie’s camp that she was no sufficiently working class friendly, Warren decided to burnish her working class credentials by claiming that her father had been a janitor. Her brother said that this wasn’t so.
Elizabeth Warren lied.
“And now comes….” is the rhetoric used in libel/defamation law suits. And now comes Elizabeth Warren, claiming that Bernie Sanders told her in 2018 that a woman could not be elected president.
Isn’t it likely that Elizabeth Warren is lying?
Bernie Sanders vociferously deny the charge, and there are few people other than diehard Warren fans or Bernie bashers that believe what likely is one of Warren’s presidentially motivated feats of rhetorical prestidigitation.
Sanders is on record as early as 1988, the time of Congresswoman Pat Schroder Colorado bid for the Democratic nomination, as saying that a woman could win the presidency. Since his entire value system, his world view and politics are rooted in the humane socialism that spring from the Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs, it is inconceivable that he would be sexist in that regards. This party and its offshoots, rooted in a broad front of mainstream socialism hat flourished in the Midwest and Western Canada before the post-World War One Red Scare, a movement that birthed the Farmer-Labor Parties and was anti-Stalinist, espoused a politics committed to gender equality.
Why would Bernie Sanders say, as late as 2018, 30 years after he had said publicly a woman could be elected president, that that was an accomplishment a woman could not achieve? Why would Senator Sanders, a most intelligent man who of all the candidates of his generation is the most “relevant” person in terms of knowing which way the wind blows, say something that is patently false?
For a woman could have won the presidency in 2008, let alone 2016. And Bernie Sanders knew that, having been defeated by Hillary Clinton in his remarkable bid for the presidency against long odds.
There might have been a conversation between Bernie Sander and Elizabeth Warren, where it was said a certain woman (Hillary Clinton) couldn’t win. One woman. Hillary Clinton. The favorite for the 2008 Democratic nomination, who lost to a political nobody, and the heavy favorite in both the primaries and in the general election. The very same Hillary who lost the 2008 nomination to a nobody and then the general election to a buffoon who was notorious as a serial liar and sex harasser.
This might have happened, Bernie might have said that because of her abrasive personality and the Wikileaks revelations, that Hillary would blow the election. But that’s not what Elizabeth Warren said.
What she said is a lie. I say a lie because it is my opinion that Elizabeth Warren is a serial liar.
DISCLAIMER: I covered Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 race against Scott Brown as a freelance writer whose work often appeared on Yahoo! News. I was completely won over, as the Elizabeth I saw on the hustings and in off-record remark.
I though that was the REAL Elizabeth Warren, not the person that comes across as the humorless university Don, widely admired with a great reputation whose class you waited two years to get into and whose stare and questions would make you shit your pants.
I thought I knew the real Elizabeth Warren, and in 2015/6 I created a Facebook page touting her as president. She was my favorite until the now disowned “Indian DNA” play. For Elizabeth Warren, in her six years in the Senate up to that point, had never done anything for Native Americans.
She was fibbing. Then it dawned on me she is a liar.
She was my candidate. And now she’s not.
Bernie Sanders is the most truthful politician I’ve ever covered. He is who he is and he says what he means and he has stuck to his policies for a lifetime.
Bernie is truthful. Liz Warren is not. And that would prove a disaster, should by some miracle, Warren’s platform ripoff of Sanders were to miracle her into the nomination.
Time will tell. But time seems to be running out.
