This is too funny. David Bernstein, a writer at The Boston Phoenix, previously warned that the “right-wing smear machine” was coming to get Elizabeth Warren. I offered a Challenge to Boston Phoenix: Defend Elizabeth Warren on Cherokee issue, or drop “right-wing smear machine” accusation.
Bernstein never met the challenge, and instead now has issued his own challenge issued last week, Hey, What Happened To The E-Dubs Fraud Story?
It’s now been a month since I wrote about irresponsible national right-wing smear reporting on Elizabeth Warren. As you might recall, the article centered primarily on charges of academic fraud, and also told of attacks on a Warren staffer. Several of the smearers I mentioned fired back, preposterously claiming that my article was really about the Cherokee heritage controversy; I responded, telling them essentially to put up or shut up about the actual smears in the article.As I say, it’s been a month. I’d have to conclude that the answer has been “shut up.”I’m not aware of any subsequent reporting, commentary, or reiteration of either of those two smears since my article appeared — certainly not at Breitbart.com, the Washington Free Beacon, or Legal Insurrection, which were the ones peddling them most prominently before.Most notable is the Breitbart site’s silence, where we still await parts 3 and 4 of the promised 4-part series by Michael Patrick Leahy about the big Warren scientific fraud scandal. Part 1 ran on June 11; Part 2 on June 25.
Bernstein has impeccable timing, because Leahy has just published another devastating article on problems with Warren’s academic background, Harvard Knew Elizabeth Warren Was a Poor Scholar When They Hired Her:
When Harvard Law School offered Elizabeth Warren a tenured faculty position in February 1993, administrators at the school knew that her scholarship had been criticized harshly. Between 1989 and 1991, three leading academic experts on bankruptcy wrote devastating critiques of the 1989 book she co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America. The reviews, published in highly respected academic journals, belied claims made at the time of her hiring by Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark that her work reflected “excellent scholarship” and by Appointments Committee member Professor Charles Fried that she was “at the very top of her profession as a scholar.” ….Any concerns that Ms. Warren and her supporters had that Shuchman’s allegations and the other highly critical academic reviews of her work would hurt her chances of being hired by Harvard Law School soon washed away. Indeed, there is no evidence that Dean Clark, Professor Charles Fried, or any member of the Appointments Committee made any reference to the three critical academic publications when they made their presentation on Ms. Warren’s qualifications to the full faculty….
Read the Leahy article, is it full of details about the serious criticisms of Warren’s academic record at the time of her Harvard appointment and the strong evidence that the full record was not presented to the full faculty. Of course, if Harvard would release its full file on Warren, we could resolve who said what to whom, or who didn’t say what to whom, conclusively.
The Boston Phoenix should be challenging Elizabeth Warren and Harvard to put up, not demanding that the “right-wing smear machine” do it for her. So there’s my new challenge to Bernstein and The Boston Phoenix:
If you really want the truth about Elizabeth Warren’s hiring by Harvard and the contemporaneous allegations regarding her scholarship, how about you demand a release of all Harvard’s files?
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