Daily Archives: 17 May 2012

Progressives and Truth

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Professor Elizabeth Warren, who also professes to be part Cherokee Indian, was on CNN’s Starting Point the other day, as reported by The Daily Caller.  In that appearance, Prof Warren said

You know, I’m proud of my Native American heritage….

Exactly what native American heritage would that be, Madam?

The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent.  Based on a review of the original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the statements of ReJeania Zmek, the Court Clerk of Logan County, Oklahoma, it is likely that the ephemeral 1894 marriage license application never existed.

Prof Warren continued in that interview:

Wall Street [et al.] wants to change the subject.

Actually, Madam, you’re the one who brought it up.  You’re the one who self-identified in the Association of American Law Schools as a minority person for your claimed purpose of “meeting other people like yourself”—never minding that the AALS lists its charges as minority, without breaking out the type of minority.  You’re the one who self-identified at UPenn and at Harvard, with the preferential hiring attached by those institutions’ affirmative action programs.  You’re the one who, just by coincidence, stopped self-identifying as a minority after you achieved tenure at Harvard.  What change of subject?

But this confusion of what is truth isn’t limited to Progressive Senate candidates.  It infects other Progressive candidates, also.  Here’s Candidate Barack Obama at the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” in August 2008, when he wanted the support of a particular group of Americans in the coming election:

Pastor Rick Warren to Barack Obama: Define marriage.

Candidate Obama: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.

(Then, with his typical hubris, Obama added, “I can afford those civil rights [of civil unions] to others.”)

Here’s President Obama, now appealing to another group [sorry about the opening ad] whose support he desires in the coming election:

I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Hmm….

Affirmative Action Revisited

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I wrote recently about the nature of affirmative action.

Here’s another take, from Victor Davis Hanson in an article in Townhall last week.

In the last 50 years, massive immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America, coupled with rapid rates of integration and intermarriage, have created a truly multiracial society.  So-called whites, for example, are now a minority of the population in California, and millions of people of mixed ancestry don’t identify with any particular ethnic group.

…

Nor is race sure proof of either poverty or past oppression.  Asian Americans, for example, have a median family income more than $10,000 a year higher than white Americans.  And if pigmentation is proof of ongoing prejudice, why don’t darker Punjabis and Arabs—who do not qualify for special racial preferences—deserve consideration over those lighter-skinned minorities who do?

…

In truth, after a half-century in our self-created racial labyrinth, no one quite knows who qualifies as an oppressed victim or why—only that the more one can change a name or emphasize lineage, the better the careerist edge.  The real worry is that soon we will have so many recompense-seeking victims that we will run out of concession-granting oppressors.

Because, after all, such programs have been fatally dishonest from their inception:

…a supposedly noble lie—that to atone for past bias we must be judged by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character….