We need to be more careful about Elizabeth Warren than she is about being Cherokee

We need to be more careful about Elizabeth Warren than she is about being Cherokee

There is zero evidence that Elizabeth Warren is Cherokee, despite her having touted such heritage at various times, and she stands by that claim in the face of contrary evidence.

Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com, and to some extent your humble correspondent, have laid Warren’s claims bare.

Last night National Review Online ran a story about Warren allegedly plagiarizing a passage in her 2006 book. Shortly thereafter NRO retracted the story because it mixed up the dates, and it turned out that another author had plagiarized from Warren, not the other way around. (As an aside, it does appear Warren took some liberties with her Cherokee recipes.)

It was an honest mistake, and quickly corrected; we’ve all made mistakes, and the right thing to do is to own up to it and make the correction, something Warren has not done about her Cherokee heritage.

Mistakes give ammunition to defenders of Warren who have no interest in the truth of the Cherokee claims in order to paint her as a victim of the right-wing blogosphere, like HuffPo:

Warren’s campaign has been beset with controversy recently. In particular, critics have seized on the revelation that Warren once, for a number of years, claimed Native American heritage in law school directories — and suggested she might have therefore received preferential treatment from schools or employers. Records records show this was not the case, though that hasn’t stopped Republican Sen. Scott Brown, whom Warren hopes to unseat in this November’s election, from using the episode for fundraising.

We need to be more careful precisely because Warren is in a bad place on her Cherokee claims, as well as on the claim that she never used her heritage in her career (more on that to come).

We need to make clear that we are not after Warren personally, we are after the truth that she doesn’t want revealed and to hold her accountable.

Mistaken accusations, even if honest and quickly corrected, only help the person whose narrative is built on mistaken accusations.

Here’s the video of Twila Barnes interview on Fox yesterday, which finally has an embed code.

Here’s Howie Carr’s interview of Barnes:

Update: This probably deserves its own post, but since I’m trying to limit the number of Elizabeth Warren posts to single digits per day, I’ll note Mark Steyn’s hysterical account as an update (emphasis mine):

And where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it – at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was “the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review,” there’s no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She’s the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she “self-identified” as Cherokee, so that makes her a “woman of color.” Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”

The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain.” But then the white man came, and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.

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