American politics may have no bigger fraud than Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren.
So I got a good chuckle from Politico’s Thursday story saying the Massachusetts Democratic senator had called Donald Trump, among other grade-school taunts, a fraud.
I don’t know whether Warren fancies herself the pot or the kettle in this one, but she’s definitely a hypocrite.
In fact, while she was preparing to call Trump a fraud, her advisers were leaking to every major press outlet they could find that she was finally going to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, now that she has secured the necessary delegates. What a profile in courage.
Endorsing Hillary could be the most fraudulent act of Warren’s brief political career, since Warren is a less compelling version of Bernie Sanders on economics and even once boasted she essentially “created” Occupy Wall Street.
But there’s stiff competition.
Start with that Fauxcahontas moniker. She earned it during her 2012 Senate campaign against Scott Brown after it came to light she’d claimed to be 1/32 Cherokee decades ago when seeking a Harvard Law faculty position.
She wasn’t able to back up the claim. “These are my family stories,” she said. As a wealthy white woman, her gaming of the affirmative-action system also made a mockery of race-based hiring and the left’s supposed commitment to “diversity.”
And wait — how did she become wealthy, anyway? Well, partly through flipping houses. Like the one owned by Mary Frances Hickman back in Warren’s native Oklahoma. In 1993, Warren convinced the elderly widow to sell her the home for a paltry $30,000, National Review reported. Five months later, Warren resold it for $145,000.
It was one of at least five such lucrative flips Warren pulled off before the housing market and economy crashed in 2008 and she became a crusader for the economic rights of the “little guy.” Like elderly widows preyed upon by opportunistic profit-seekers, perhaps?
But the real raison d’être of Warren’s political career is to stick it to Wall Street. Last year, Bloomberg Businessweek credited her fiery anti-bank rhetoric and senatorial procedural tricks with sabotaging attempts to roll back heavy-handed financial regulation and with making income inequality an annual rallying cry for Democrats.
Warren has special ire for Goldman Sachs. After CEO Lloyd Blankfein criticized Bernie Sanders’ class-warfare rhetoric, Warren lit into him.
Blankfein, she said, “thinks it’s fine to prosecute small business owners, it’s fine to go hard after individuals who have no real resources, but don’t criticize companies like Goldman Sachs and their very, very important CEO.”
And then she tossed in one of her regular demagogic tricks: keeping the public angry at the banks for the 2008 financial crash. “When Blankfein says that criticizing those who break the rules is dangerous to the economy, then he’s just repeating another variation of ‘too big to fail, too big to jail, too big even to prosecute.’ That tells you here we are, seven years after the crisis and these guys still don’t get it.”
Sounds like she was ready to endorse Sanders, right? Wrong. She held back until the primary contest was basically over — and then offered her backing to Hillary.
What’s so ironic about this is that if Goldman Sachs, as an institution, were to somehow take human form and run for political office, it would be — hell, it is — Hillary Clinton.
It’s not just the donations from the firm to her campaign, which total about $180,000 so far this cycle. It’s also that the firm has paid her four times that amount in speaking fees since she left the Senate.
To say what? Well, we don’t know. Clinton won’t release the transcripts. But we have a pretty good idea. In one speech, an attendee told Politico’s Ben White, “She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”
Warren can back whomever she pleases. But let’s not pretend Hillary Clinton is anything other than the manifestation of everything Warren claims to be fighting against.
Warren’s a fraud, always has been. What’s amazing is that her “progressive” fans still fall for it.