In the old Locker Room I listed several notorious (and sometimes downright hilarious) examples of the socialist revision of truth to make it politically expedient. These include such euphemisms as “fake but accurate,” falsehoods that are “essential truths,” etc., you know, the everything-is-political world of “fictional documentaries” with “no fixed truths” where “certain lies are good.”
Jonah Goldberg has pointed me to another one, which is already downright hilarious and may well go on to become notorious. It is Bernie Quigley’s defense of Elizabeth Warren in The Hill — Elizabeth Warren who, in the words of Mark Steyn, is the “100 per cent white female [hired by America’s premier law school] as its first ‘woman of color’ on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor’s favorite crab dish to a tribal cookbook”:
The first poetic vision of Europeans in the new world was that of James Fenimore Cooper, who conjured Natty Bumpo [sic]. He had an “Indian name” — he had several: Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder — indicating that he had been “reborn” in the new world in the Indian spirit. It is the oldest and most important myth in the American canon of our folklore …
So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. …
Quigley goes on to praise Warren for bringing “a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston” and concludes by saying “I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn’t back down on this, because wanting to be Indian, like Hawkeye, makes us in a deeper sense fully American.”
So to recap: Turns out Warren isn’t a fraud who posed as a racial minority in order to reap the diversity windfall at Harvard (in other words, who took the plot of the 1986 movie “Soul Man” and changed a few details, then actually lived it) — no, no, she’s deeper, fresher, more fully American than thou.
Ward Churchill, eat your charlatan’s heart out.