Be careful about the ancestry you claim

Unless you know the full story. Via Legal Insurrection, a cruel irony in Elizabeth Warren’s saga:

Throughout her career and political campaign, Elizabeth Warren has found victims everywhere she looked, including when she looked in the mirror and saw an alleged descendant of one of the most historically victimized groups, Native Americans.

In what may be the ultimate and cruelest irony, not only is it unlikely that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee, it turns out that Warren’s great-great-great grandfather was a member of a militia unit which participated in the round-up of the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears.

Whoops.

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“The ghost of liberalism future”

The glories of long car trips. I attempted to explain to my husband the gory details of Elizabeth Warren’s Indian implosion somewhere after St. Louis. And though she looks like what she is–chiefly, a horrid liar incapable of defending her use of an incorrect label she took gross advantage of–I would never put it past liberals to overlook crooks and liars. (Marion Barry?!)

But I do think Warren has inflicted more damage to liberalism than the potential loss of the”Kennedy” seat: she has proven the uselessness of racial preferences in hiring. If she can claim Indian status, then anyone can.

From Commentary:

Because Warren is playing an important role in our political discourse: she is the ghost of liberalism future. Warren’s alleged use of affirmative action, if true, would have to be the most egregious abuse of the system at the expense of minorities we’ve seen yet. Elizabeth Warren is, as a white woman, statistically speaking very much a member of this country’s majority. The only category in which she is a true minority is wealth: Elizabeth Warren is very, very rich.

How telling. I read something earlier I can’t find: Professor Warren is the only non-Ivy League grad in the law faculty. Double-minority has benefits, no?

But Warren was not done making a mockery of a system she seems to have exploited, and in so doing risked discrediting. To call her on these shenanigans, she explained, is sexist. Hot Air has caught her repeating this claim, making it a pillar of her defense. First, her campaign spokeswoman said this: “Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown who did the same thing with the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. It’s outrageous.”

Then Warren waded into it herself, saying of Brown: “What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?”

The sad part about all this is that Warren is clearly intelligent and dedicated to her (redistributionist) cause. Back in August, Christopher Caldwell wrote a piece on her in the Weekly Standard in which he praised her earlier writing as “brilliant and counterintuitive work.” Though many on the right object to Warren’s politics, no one thought she was ill-equipped intellectually for the important debate on economic policy now sweeping the public sphere.

To say nothing of her inability to have a better excuse at the ready for the long-lived lie.

When the box doesn’t fit

Bend and stretch.

Justice is colorblind. Too bad our society no longer is after the multi-culti hogwash that has bread out of us the notion that we are all American, but we are now a check-the-box ethnicity. The folks who went out of their way to brand George Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” as opposed to “Hispanic” will now have to eat their words.

Why?

Turns out he’s black, too. Is it enough that it’s check-the-box-black?

Waiting for the race baiter Al Sharpton to apologize in 3, 2…

Clarence Thomas the Frodo Baggins of the right?

So suggests Walter Russell Mead after reading Jeffery Toobin’s profile of Clarence Thomas in the New Yorker. He writes of Thomas:

his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state

Few things have made me smile as broadly as I am now after reading this:

There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm.  Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings.  Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher.  Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.

At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonin Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger.  No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way.  Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.

If Toobin’s revionist take is correct, (and I defer to his knowledge of the direction of modern constitutional thought) it means that liberal America has spent a generation mocking a Black man as an ignorant fool, even as constitutional scholars stand in growing amazement at the intellectual audacity, philosophical coherence and historical reflection embedded in his judicial work.

I have long been a fan of Clarence Thomas. pjHusband and I read his autobiography in awe. Rarely in life will you find someone whose character has been so supremely shaped by the real adversity he faced growing up. Rarely in life will you see someone so completely caricatured and vilified, ironically with the very stereotypes the left claims to fight.

Read the rest of Walter Russel Mead’s piece, the New Blue Nightmare: Clarence Thomas and the Amendment of Doom. It might eke a smile out of you, too.

“I like to say that for the black community, nothing will change until we learn to love our children more than we love the Democratic party”

So argues “Unlikely Supporter” Sonnie Johnson, a 30 year-old wife and mom.

Why so “unlikely” according to ABC News?

Oh, yeah, she’s black. Whoopsie, your liberal slip is showing:

The 30-year-old African-American mother and wife is featured in “The Undefeated” as one of the many people Palin captivated when John McCain thrust her onto the national stage as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. In Pella, Iowa today for the premiere of the film, Johnson said she latched on to Palin when the former Alaska governor took the stage at the Republican National Convention.

“We were watching it on TV and my daughter was like, ‘A girl can be president?,’” Johnson recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes, baby, girls can do anything.’ That was the moment — I saw that look in my daughter’s eye, that anything in possible. The next week, I went to my very first political event, and that was to see Sarah Palin. John McCain and Sarah Palin.”

Johnson has become increasingly involved in the tea party since then, speaking at tea party events around her native Virginia. She’ll give the keynote address at an event held by the Charlottesville, VA. tea party on the Fourth of July with her young daughter by her side.

Amazing, isn’t it, how our children can inspire pursuits never imagined?

The Lonely Conservative chimes in:

Good for her, for looking at the issues, rather than the party. Bad on ABC News for finding it so “unlikely” that Americans whose skin happens to be dark would support Sarah Palin, or other Tea Party candidates. But hey, at least they didn’t mock or belittle her as so many liberals do to those who step outside of their stereotypical boxes. And in all fairness, at least they told her story. I’m sure those who aren’t mocking Mrs. Johnson would rather just ignore her.

Ignore her, malign her. But Sonnie Johnson and the millions of other mothers–black, white and in-between–are a forced to behold.

UPDATE: linked as a Recommended Read by Pundette. Thanks!

“The new N-word”

Or is it the new F-word? Ah, the plight of liberals, censoring language at every turn. Stacy McCain highlights the N-onsense:

According to David Gregory of NBC News, it is “coded racially-tinged language” to mention the increased use of food stamps under President Obama’s economic agenda

In a way Gregory’s right: it’s the N-ew N-ormal in the Age of Obama. Food stamps for all!

Head over to The Other McCain to see the video.

In other racially coded news, the First Lady sure knows how to pick excellent role models for kids. 

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson asks questions that will get him labeled mean-old-white-man-keepin-the-other-man-down in a hurry:

First, what exactly is race today in America in which intermarriage and immigration have increasingly made it — and its ugly twin racial purity — often irrelevant? We are no longer a country largely 85-90% “white” and 10-12% “black,” but something almost hard to categorize in racial terms. Do university admission officers adopt the 1/16, one-drop racial rule of the old Confederacy? Does being one fourth African-American qualify one for consideration; three-fourths Japanese; half Mexican-American? Does a simple surname add — and often by intent — authenticity and credulity? The son of Linda Hernandez and Jason Smith — a Bobby Smith — is not considered, without genealogical investigation, Hispanic, but the son of Linda Smith and Jason Hernandez — a Roberto Hernandez of equal 50/50 ancestry — is almost instantly? If so, is race a state of mind and personal choice more than circumstances of birth? What exactly is white and what a minority — a dark-skinned Armenian-American is the former, a light-skinned Colombian American is the latter? A dark Sicilian-American is white, Barack Obama is black?

[…]

Is there a color-coded graph somewhere that says the darker one is, the more consideration one is due?

It’s sad, isn’t it, when I know the President and the Attorney General would answer in the affirmative. Read the rest.

Liberal angst and anguish: post-election edition

Oh my.  From Vanity Fair, liberal bedwetting on display from the editor, h/t Hot Air headlines:

The general anti-Obama rage out there is palpable. But it’s no more virulent than the anti-Bush sentiment that has pervaded the country for much of the past decade—although this being America, there’s an attendant hatred for Obama that has more to do with race than anything else.

Of course. We just elected two new black GOP congressmen, another Indian-American governor, the first hispanic female governor, and a new Cuban-American Senator. Because we’re racists.

More brilliance:

What makes today’s fury more worrying is the fact that angry right-wing extremists tend to carry guns in disproportionate numbers to their liberal counterparts.

He echoes lefty-wacko-friend-of-the-One Bernadine Dorhn’s concerns, so you know they must really be wringing hands at Upper Eat Side cocktail parties this week.  They’re angry. Racists! And they have guns! Oh my!

On voting for witches and the like:

A distinguished colleague of mine likens the wiggy mood of the nation to that of a hormonal teenager. What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums? You call it teenaged. Is voting for a deranged Tea Party candidate such as Christine O’Donnell, who has no demonstrable talent for lawmaking, or much else, so different from shouting “Whatever!” and slamming the bedroom door? Is moaning that Obama doesn’t emote enough or get sufficiently angry so different from screaming, “You don’t understand!!!”

And how, pray tell, is that any different from chugging Obama-aide and voting for a President with no executive experience, a shaky voting record, who wasn’t vetted by anyone let alone the press?   Oh, forgot.  He had a (D) after his name, halos around his head, and would part the seas and stop the inevitable rise from melting ice caps, so that makes it all a-ok.

In need of a palate cleanser?  Try Ann Coulter, “We’re all bigots now!”

UPDATE: Welcome to readers from David Horowitz’s NewsRealBlog.  Thanks for the link!

Multiculturalism and liberal hand-wringing: theater in Colorado Springs “too white”

Haven’t we moved past this idiocy?

Apparently not:

The air goes out of the room when Desireè Myers finally speaks up.

“I just don’t feel like I fit here,” Myers tells the two dozen or so participants in a Gazette-organized discussion about the lack of diversity in local theater. A trained actor, she hasn’t been cast in a professional production since 2008. Before that: 2004. “I’ve given up.”

Myers is black.

It’s possible, of course, that she’s not cast because she’s untalented. Maybe she’s sensitive about racial issues. Or maybe Myers has good reason to feel excluded.

The story is from the Sunday Colorado Springs Gazette on the lack of diversity in local theater.  I kid not.  Serious liberal hand-wringing on display:

In 2009-10, the major companies — the Fine Arts Center Theatre Company, TheatreWorks and in their first seasons, Springs Ensemble Theatre and the newly resurrected Star Bar Players — cast 15 minority actors. With the exception of TheatreWorks’ and New York artist Ping Chong’s “Invisible Voices,” which was built around the stories of six locals living with disabilities, none were leads.

The final score: 15 actors of color to 174 Caucasian actors.

The numbers are even starker when you go back a few years. Since the 2006-07 season, the FAC and TheaterWorks have cast 928 roles. Fifty-six minority actors were cast: The FAC with nine and TheatreWorks 47.

Producers and directors explain the imbalance by saying the minority talent pool in the Springs is small and non-white actors don’t show to auditions. At a Fine Arts Center audition for the Gershwin extravaganza “Crazy for You,” 225 actors came out. Four were actors of color. None were cast.

Maybe that’s no surprise when most plays and musicals are written, produced, directed and acted by whites — white men, in fact. In city of 325,921 whites (according to 2009 numbers provided by the city), audiences, too, are predominantly white. If you’re among the city’s estimated 88,000 non-white Springs residents, you will rarely find yourself on stage, hear your stories and even see someone there who looks like you.

As with any count-the-number-of-minority-number-crunching, someone’s feeling’s are hurt as a result of the exclusion:

“If you don’t see yourself on the stage or on the screen, you’re erased,” says Sharon Jensen, director of the New York-based advocacy group The Alliance for the Inclusion in the Arts. Jensen is white. “You’re invisible.”

Of course, the “expert’s” skin color has to be noted.  She’s white.  But she obviously knows how it feels to be excluded, right?  Maybe she felt the angst of females banned from Shakespearean productions. 

More: 

The lack of diversity in theater, while particularly acute in the Colorado Springs, certainly isn’t unique to us. Even theater meccas like New York City fall short of equal casting, especially in lead roles. How many Hispanic Broadway stars can you name? Or playwrights or directors?

“It’s not an equal playing field yet,” says Jensen, who, as head of the New York advocacy group, has been at the front lines of this issue for 21 years. “Far from it.”

In fact, a four-year study of professional theaters revealed more than 90 percent of actors in American shows from 1982 to 1986 were white. If “cultural” productions like “Dreamgirls” were discounted, those numbers went even higher.

My jaw dropped reading this yesterday over coffee.  So Colorado Springs falls short of some mythical standard of multicultural casting that isn’t even the standard in New York City?  Why then all the whining? 

What’s the excuse for the obviously racist theater directors who are all, um, liberal?  (Liberal racism, oh, no, it couldn’t be, could it?)

“It wasn’t so much overt racism,” Jensen says carefully, “as people doing business as they always had. Those people were primarily Caucasian. They were drawing on a pool of talent that was Caucasian because that’s what they knew.”

Ultimately, Jensen says, it’s not an issue of employment, but of doing the right thing. Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, who is Asian American, puts an even finer point on the problem in a 1990 interview by The New York Times.

‘’The real issue is not who gets cast,” he said, “but that any organization continue(s) to perpetuate and encourage stereotypes at the expense of artists of color, which borders on 19th-century imperialism.’’

Hwang was referring to the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, as the Eurasian lead of “Miss Saigon.”

The Actors’ Equity Association agreed, first barring Pryce from playing the role he originated on London’s West End and then reversing their decision. Pryce won a Tony for his portrayal and played the role on Broadway for 10 years.

Imperialism, of course.  But at the hands of white liberals.  No wonder the angst. 

 

Question: if, according to liberal doctrine, a white man can’t play the part of a minority because he couldn’t possibly be as culturally sensitive and attuned, then what makes it kosher for a minority to play the part of a white?  See why this gets so stupid in a hurry?

 

Want to know how stupid?  Read on:  

[Clinton Turner Davis] also maintains that you can’t task a white director to helm “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s classic exploration of black family life.

It’s a slap in the face of every minority director looking for work, he says.

“If you have a true commitment to increasing diversity, then the programming would change,” concludes Davis only days before heading to Asia to translate the national poem of Vietnam. “You don’t do ‘1776’ (the Revolutionary War musical running this season). You do something else.”

To the question of whether he’s contradicting his own high standards by presuming to interpret someone else’s culture, he laughs.

“I’m a very culturally sensitive person,” he says. “I’m stepping into this with tremendous humility and profound respect.”

I will give the author of this liberal angst on display props for pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of a black director who rails against the idea of a white person directing a “black” play. 

Of course Davis possesses the cultural sensitivity, humility and respect for his project–the translation of a national poem of a culture with which he holds no bond or tie even though he condemns the same from any white who dare do the same.  But no one else can possibly have the same degree of cultural know-how as a liberal black college theater professor.   Especially someone white.

 

I’m sure Davis agrees with the argument that a white English teacher cannot possibly teach Invisible Man or Native Son.  For that matter, maybe woman should be barred from teaching either one?  By his measure, what makes him think a black teacher can “access” Shakespeare?  No one asks that question.  Of course, they say, a black teacher can teach Shakespeare because Shakespeare wrote about the human condition.  What makes Native Son or A Raisin in the Sun any less human? 

 

I loathe the politics of multiculturalism because it leads to division, not unity.

 

TGIF: VDH optimism and Krauthammer eviscerates the liberal crutch. Who could ask for more?

Light blogging ahead: my in-laws will be here in a week and the rest of the boxes must be unpacked.  Books and papers are the bane of moving.  Twitter feed and google reader will be updated, but posts might be a little skimpy.  Apologies.  It’s funny how life happens, no?

Optimism from VDH who argues that “Decline is a choice.”  He writes:

As the summer winds down, there is more and more talk of decline in the air. Some of it comes from the left, as a sort of giddy notion that we are now, at best, devolving into what the Greeks called prôtos metaksu isôn, first among equals, enjoying traditional prestige but otherwise nothing much special in comparison to the Europeans, India, and China.

In the age of Obama, the notion of not being exceptional or preeminent comes as a relief to millions on the left who pretty much are in sync with the protocols of the United Nations. On the right, there is a sense that Obama is the ultimate expression of downfall; given the wild spending, the iconic efforts abroad at apology, and the rampant entitlements we simply aren’t what we once were. In between, most aren’t quite sure—but sure are worried that we may never climb out of our self-created indebtedness crater, and that the culture’s education, the nation’s borders, and the civilization’s values are eroding.

I agree with the latter take, but see decline in history as largely psychological. After all, a Rome that was little more than 4 million and half of Italy almost simultaneously fought both Hannibal and Philip V and ploughed on after losing over 100,000 dead between 219-216 BC to victory, while by AD 450-80 an empire of 70 million, with a million square miles of territory, could not thwart thuggish tribes across the Rhine and Danube.

A very poor United States in 1941 defeated imperial Japan and helped to defeat Nazi Germany in less than four years. A few hundred thousand immigrants between 1870 and 1960 took a godforsaken desert in California’s central valley and turned it into an oasis of agriculture, for nearly half a century with no more than muscle and mule power.

He goes on to point out our exceptionalism in every field–well, sans the arts which have succumbed to race/class/gender orthodoxy.  And he’s right.  Read it, smile, and know that as we recovered from Jimmy Carter, we will recover from Obama.

(As an aside, did Carter have fans who still wore campaign t-shirts?  I was too young.  And I still see women decked out in their Obama paraphenlia snatching up magazines on which he graces the cover.)

Charles Krauthammer examines the liberal tendency to cry “Racist rube! Bitter clinger! Idiot!” which he refers to as the “last refuge of a liberal.”  He writes:

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

The great unwashed don’t want a Ground Zero Mosque, fail to see the brilliance of a judge who decides two men can marry, and feel the borders should be protected.  Rubes, all.  Too bad those rubes can vote, eh? Read it.

Boxes call!

 

I needed to be in bed an hour ago tab dump

Ross Douthat, The Roots of White Anxiety.  Color me shocked that the NYT printed this. 

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

[…]

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

Via Diane Suffern in the Green Room, some historical perspective à la Newt on the slap in the face known as the 9/11 mosque:

The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks – is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites.  For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term.  It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

Today, some of the Mosque’s backers insist this term is being used to “symbolize interfaith cooperation” when, in fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.  It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.

I share Suffern’s sentiments regarding Newt, though. She writes:

It’s heartening to see two possible GOP presidential contenders take on this issue, even if the political jockeying does come wearyingly early in the election cycle.  I did find it curious that Gingrich peppered his argument with the term “elites,” as if being a former educator, historian, author, Speaker of the House and Beltway insider somehow excludes him?  Regardless, if the good Professor continues down this route, I just might forgive him for this and this.  Might.

Yikes: the Tax Tsunami headed our way. 

Heh: budget cuts in Newark so steep, no money for toilet paper.  (A tip from the Arab world: don’t shake their hands).

An inconvenient chakra: Al Gore’s march of the Masseuses

On a more serious note, pray for Petraeus.

House Democrats prove their jackassery.  That’s where that’ll get ya.  (Don’t let the door hit you on the way out).