Much of the liberal media and some non-liberal outlets (think: the one you are reading right now) took a dim view of Donald Trump’s Pocahontas remark, delivered off-handedly while celebrating the achievements of World War II-era Navajo code talkers at the White House Monday.
But CNN set its already low bar still lower by not only tearing the president a new one but by perpetuating the lie that blond and blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren has so much as a corpuscle of American Indian blood coursing through her veins.
Like other sympathetic venues, CNN opens with Warren’s incredulous reaction:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
There he was, at a ceremony to honor Native Americans, men who have really put it all on the line to save American lives, to save lives of people, our allies, during World War II, really amazing people. And President Trump couldn’t even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur.
I submit that for something to be a racial slur, the target has to be a member of the race being slurred. But CNN pretends that Warren satisfies that criterion by publishing another explanatory quote of the senator:
I learned about my family the way that most people learn about their families. My brothers and I learned from our mother and our daddy and our grandparents who we are. And that’s it. That’s how we learned it. That’s what we know.
The network also takes on Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, who defended the president by noting that Warren had used the claim of her Indian heritage to advance her career. Here is Warren’s rebuttal:
Never. I never used it to get ahead I never used it to get into school. I never used it to get a job.
But then there’s this from Politico:
Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.
… [A] 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”
“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”
Hmm. Where on earth could these two universities — one where Warren received a degree, the second where she taught — latch on to the notion that she’s an American Indian? Better yet, when did she stop claiming she was one?