Patterico's Pontifications

10/8/2019

Fauxcahontas’s Claim of Discrimination Is — Surprise, Surprise — Almost Certainly a Lot of Bunk

Filed under: General — JVW @ 12:14 pm



[guest post by JVW]

The woman who many of us believe is on the fast track to becoming the Democrats’ nominee for President is once again caught peddling self-aggrandizing flim-flam. Senator Elizabeth Warren, notorious for using a bogus claim of Native American heritage in order to jump-start a career in legal academia which took her all the way to a endowed chair at Harvard Law School, has been spinning a yarn in her stump speech about how she was fired (or, to be perfectly accurate, not retained) in her position as a public school teacher in the Riverdale (New Jersey) School District. According to Lieawatha’s account, after teaching there in the 1970-71 school year she had intended to return in fall of 1971, but upon seeing that she was “visibly pregnant” the principal of her school “showed her the door.” Her daughter Amelia was born on September 2, 1971. Having allegedly been dismissed on account of her maternal status, young Mrs. Warren decided to attend law school and the rest, as they say, is history.

To be sure, once upon a time in America it was common for female public school teachers to be required to be single and/or childless. My next-door neighbor in my boyhood, born in 1901, had been a school teacher in our town in the early 1920s and was required to resign when she got married in 1927 because the school board’s policy back then was that only single women could teach. But I have a difficult time believing that the same sort of archaic policy existed in New Jersey nearly a half-century later even though, as Sen. Warren points out, federal law didn’t officially prohibit this sort of discrimination until a few years later.

Today, the Washington Free Beacon is calling out Senator Warren for her lies. They dug into the archives of the Riverdale School District, and made an interesting discovery in the school board meeting minutes from Spring 1971:

Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”

This version makes a great deal more sense in light of how Mrs. Warren herself described her teaching days over a decade ago in a speaking engagement at the University of California, Berkeley. Back then, the future candidate described the end of her teaching career coming when she appears to have soured on a career as a K-12 educator. Here’s how she characterized her brief teaching career back then:

“I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me,’” Warren said in the 2007 interview. “I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ My husband’s view of it was, ‘Stay home. We have children, we’ll have more children, you’ll love this.’ And I was very restless about it.”

Back then she was content to cast her future ex-husband as the caveman who encouraged her to stay barefoot and pregnant, but in the hyper-grievance world of 2019 that story is not interesting enough for the super-woke, so a sexist cro-magnon principal who can’t accept the idea of a working mother is assigned the role as the new villain. Like Barack Obama before her, however, this predilection for turning oneself into a martyr for civil rights comes at an unfair cost to the ancillary players in the story. Just as Mr. Obama unfairly maligned his high school basketball coach for denying him playing time because, according to the future President’s first autobiography, the coach thought young Barry’s game was “too black,” only to have biographer David Maraniss reveal that the lack of playing time was due to Barry’s shortcomings as a player, so too has Sen. Warren now unfairly maligned a flesh-and-blood person by turning him into an old-fashioned sexist in order to cast herself as a victim. I do sort of hope that the principal has gone on to his Heavenly reward and is not alive to see his reputation be so cynically shredded by a dishonest and calculating shrew.

Elizabeth Warren has thus far managed to get away with her phony use of affirmative action, her double standards, and her pretend populism largely because she has been for the most part a regional figure and the dominant newspaper in her market, The Boston Globe, tends to avoid any stories that shed an unfavorable light upon their Golden Girl. But now that she is firmly in the pantheon of national movers-and-shakers, the risk of her being exposed for her mendacity have increased. Sure, the Globe is as of his writing still silent on this particular story, but CBS News has picked it up in full as of last night, and other national outlets are following along. Here’s hoping that the Senator is at some point called on her hokum and bunkum.

[Note: Please don’t decide that a real elucidating comment on this post would be “Well, Trump lies all the time too, so there!” For one thing, we all know that the President habitually prevaricates about all things large and small, and will continue to do so until he takes his last breath on earth. Nobody but the most Trumpest Trumper would try to defend him on this, and the last thing we need is to have yet another post discussion hijacked by whataboutism. I thank you in advance for your consideration.]

– JVW

Trump Blocks Interview of Ambassador Sondland

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:04 am



The Failing New York Times (which is actually doing quite well):

The Trump administration directed a top American diplomat involved in its pressure campaign on Ukraine not to appear Tuesday morning for a scheduled interview in the House’s impeachment inquiry.

The decision to block Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from speaking with investigators for three House committees is certain to provoke an immediate conflict with potentially profound consequences for the White House and President Trump. House Democrats have repeatedly warned that if the administration tries to interfere with their investigation, it will be construed as obstruction, a charge they see as potentially worthy of impeachment.

As a Twitter friend points out, in his tweets explaining the decision, Trump is not even bothering to claim privilege. He’s just saying Sondland doesn’t have to testify because the impeachment is being run by Democrats:

T̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶t̶ ̶1̶0̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶t̶ ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶e̶r̶ The articles of impeachment just got 10 sentences longer.

Why is Sondland important? He talked to Trump before sending the “to be clear we are totally not committing any crimes here” text:

Apparently inquiry into how that text got written is not to be allowed.

Okay then.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]


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