The Lies of Elizabeth Warren

In the movie Random Hearts Harrison Ford plays a police detective who loses his wife in a plane accident.  Kristin Thomas plays a woman politician who loses her husband in a plane crash.  As the movie unfolds we discover that the spouses were not only on the same plane but they were having an affair and were on a “get away weekend” unbeknownst to either surviving spouse.  At virtually every turn in the movie another lie is exposed as the two surviving spouses are forced to confront the deceit of their errant spouses.

Towards the end of the movie there is a climactic moment during which Mr. Ford turns to Ms. Thomas and says:

I get the same feeling every time another story breaks about socialist denier Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) invented biography – that and the déjà vu feeling from Hillary Clinton’s two unsuccessful runs for the presidency.

Everyone is painfully aware of Ms. Warren’s claim to Native American ancestry.  She has none.  She has none despite her assertion that it is possible that she maybe could have 1/1064th part – a figure so low that virtually every European migrant since the Mayflower also possesses.  But that isn’t the end of the deceit.

Ms. Warren has stated that her claim to indigenous ancestry is based on stories that her mother told.  According to Ms. Warren her mother, Pauline Reed, was shunned by her father’s family because they were sure that she was Native American – something to do with “high cheekbones” (a trait not limited to Native Americans).  Ms. Warren continued that the bigotry of her paternal grandparents drove her mother to elope.  Nonsense.  Notice of her mother’s impending marriage to her father was published in local newspapers and his parents staged a large reception for the couple when they returned from the “elopement” – one town away.  Of course when Ms. Warren began to spread this phony story, her paternal grandparents were dead, her maternal grandparents were dead and both of her parents were dead.

But bigotry towards Native Americans became an opportunity for those willing to claim indigenous ancestry – and Ms. Warren was more than willing to do so.  Claiming to be Native American gave her admission to law school, a position on the Harvard law school faculty and a “check-off” for running as a Democrat in Massachusetts – she claimed membership in a “victim category.”   I don’t know which is more embarrassing – a wealthy Ivy League maven claiming Native American ancestry for privileged access or a compliant mainstream media for perpetuating that lie even after it became obvious.

But the lies don’t end there.  Ms. Warren claimed that she was a “special education teacher” to demonstrate her empathy with yet another victim group.  She may have obtained a college degree in the field but to say that she actually taught special education children is, like most things in Ms. Warren’s biography a bit of an overstatement.  As the facts have unfolded Ms. Warren was hired as a speech pathologist by the Riverdale Board of Education in New Jersey for the 1970-71 school year.  She only lasted one year.  She was six months pregnant at the end of the first school year and decided to stay home to take care of herself and attend to the birth of her first child.  Ms. Warren claims that she was “fired” because she was pregnant.  She got a “twofer” – empathy for a victim class and discrimination against women, another victim class.

As usual, the facts got in her way. .  The principal who was blamed as the culprit for Ms. Warren’s “termination” has denied that she was terminated.  An earlier version of the story, as related by Ms. Warren, is that she lacked the educational requirements to continue teaching and after taking a couple of graduate courses towards the requirement she decided that “special education” wasn’t for her and instead enrolled in law school.  So Ms. Warren has made a career choice appear to be a double instance of “victimhood.”  What a gal!

So what does this have to do with the scene from Random Hearts?  Well maybe nothing and maybe everything.  A marriage is the ultimate act of trust.  The intimacy of a marriage includes the disclosure of all of the warts and wounds we all seek to keep private. There is no way – nor should there be – that one can monitor the activities of his/her spouse.  You trust that your spouse will honor the intimacy of marriage and join in maintaining that privacy.  The violation of that trust not only reveals the true nature of your spouse but it calls into question whether that type of trust can ever be recovered.

I don’t mean to suggest that the lies of politicians reach as deeply as the violation of trust in a marriage, but the cost of such lies can be just as damaging to a country and its economy – recovery from which can be just as difficult.  In this instance it is the issue of healthcare.

We have already experienced the effects of lies about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) by former President Barack Obama;

Let’s understand that this wasn’t just a usual political overstatement – a gilding of the lily.  We have subsequently learned that Mr. Obama had documented information prior to his statement that Obamacare was going to force people to quit their doctors and quit their healthcare plans.  It was a deliberate lie – a fundamental lie – effecting sixteen percent of the nation’s economy.  It contributed significantly to the doubling of the national debt and the displacement of tens of thousand of people who prior to Obamacare had coverage.  It has become Mr. Obama’s signature legacy and that is not meant as a compliment.

But Ms. Warren’s “Medicare for All” proposal makes Obamacare pale in comparison.  Ms. Warren has claimed that the cost of her healthcare plan would be $52 Trillion dollars over a ten-year period.  That is a lie. It needed to be that low so that Ms. Warren could claim that it would not raise taxes on the Middle Class.  And that is another lie. (Even her Democrat rivals have demonstrated that she grossly underestimated the cost and over estimated the revenues to pay for it.)

The current national debt is about $21 Trillion dollars and the current annual deficit is about $1 Trillion. The entire budget for the United States is about $4.7 Trillion. Ms. Warren’s healthcare plan would add $5 Trillion annually to that deficit if here pipe dreams of revenue do not occur. It is the sheer magnitude of these programs that makes Ms. Warren’s lies as existential to the country’s economic health as cheating is existential to the continuity of a marriage.  In either case the ability to recover and continue as before is highly doubtful.  And that assumes that Ms. Warren is telling the truth about the costs and revenue from tax increases proposed.  She is not.

And therein lies the point.  Ms. Warren has lied frequently to promote herself.  So frequently that she, like Ms. Clinton, appears to lie when the truth would serve her better.  So I ask you:

Are you willing to bet the economic future of America on the tales of a demonstrable liar?