Lie-a-watha

Shrinking violets don’t become presidential contenders. Still, even at the highest level of overweening ambition, Elizabeth Warren stands out. She has clawed her way to the top by hook and by crook. One of her favorite techniques is the bald-faced lie. As an academic, she is best known for an article claiming that medical crises are largely responsible for personal bankruptcies. Warren’s article has been used (as she no doubt intended) to promote socialized medicine, but it has been thoroughly debunked. See Gail Heriot’s analysis in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, embedded below.

Warren’s deeply flawed, if not outright deceptive, article on “medical” bankruptcies largely made her academic career. But she wouldn’t have gotten to the big time on the basis of an article, no matter how useful to the Left. Warren’s plus-factor, sheer gold in the academy, was her claim to be an American Indian. One can imagine how Harvard’s administrators salivated at the thought of having an actual Indian on their law faculty. We all know how that turned out, although it is fair to point out that if Warren hadn’t run for the Senate, she would have lived out her academic career as a proud member of the Cherokee Nation. Or the High Cheekbones Nation. Whatever.

Then we have Warren’s lie about being fired from a teaching job when she was young because she got pregnant. That story has been conclusively disproved because someone took the trouble to dig up the school board meeting minutes from the relevant time. Warren wasn’t fired. The school district wanted her to stay, but she quit.

Which brings us to the subject of Warren’s two children. At an event a day or two ago, a school choice activist questioned Warren on education. The Free Beacon reports:

Sarah Carpenter, a pro-school choice activist who organized a protest of Warren’s Thursday speech in Atlanta, told Warren that she had read news reports indicating the candidate had sent her kids to private school. Though Warren once favored school choice and was an advocate for charter schools, she changed her views while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

“We are going to have the same choice that you had for your kids because I read that your children went to private schools,” Carpenter told Warren when the two met, according to video posted to social media…

Warren denied the claim, telling Carpenter, “My children went to public schools.”

Here is the video:

Asked an uncomfortable question, Warren instinctively lied. In fact, as her campaign later admitted, “Elizabeth’s daughter went to public school. Her son went to public school until 5th grade.” The Free Beacon discovered that Alex Warren attended the “tony” Kirby Hall School in Austin, Texas, during the 1986-1987 school year. Thereafter, he evidently continued to attend private schools, given the campaign’s acknowledgement that his public school experience ended in the 5th grade.

I have no issue with politicians’ children, or anyone else, attending private schools. But that choice is a problem for Democratic politicians, like Elizabeth Warren, who resolutely deny school choice to less well-heeled Americans. The point here is how readily Warren lied about how she educated her own son–not something that anyone could inadvertently forget. No, this was another lie by the notorious Lie-a-watha. Warren is a corrupt and deeply dishonest person who must never be allowed near the levers of executive power.

Here is Gail Heriot’s rebuttal to Warren’s article on medical bankruptcies: