As entertaining as it is watching Scott Brown trip over shoe laces tied together by his own staff (marinating in the Obamacare he claimed to oppose), and reading Margery Eagan — Marjorie Eagan! — assert that Mitt Romney’s “Seamus Moment” was definitional, nothing compares to Fox wannabe The Herald’s routed assertion that Elizabeth Warren lied about her Native American heritage.
Warren is, of course, part Cherokee, according to reporter Hillary Chabot.
“Warren’s Great, Great, Great Escape,” the newspaper trumpeted today, elevating professor Warren to an amalgam of the forces that made America great: Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Charles Bronson.
Of course, if Warren represents our hero GIs shuttling back and forth on ingenious trolleys as they burrow their way out of a Nazi POW camp, one hesitates to imagine what the Herald thinks is the best metaphor for her opponent.
Click here for video of Warren and her Great Escape comrades outwitting their rivals, following the conceptual paradigm of The Herald’s headline writers.
dont-get-cute says
Well, you did include the link to Eagan’s column today, but you made it seem like it was a column about Romney (maybe you meant to say “Elizabeth Warren’s Seamus Moment?”. Wow, Margery Eagan! even gets it.
SomervilleTom says
I’m not a subscriber, so I don’t know what’s in the “electronic edition” of today’s Herald. I don’t see any references to the “Great Escape”. Instead, I see more of the Herald’s usual racist, misogynist, and bigoted rubbish put forward by the usual suspects. Howie Carr makes Jeff Jacoby look brilliant — no easy feat.
Can we perhaps let this non-story die the natural death it deserves? Further discussion only perpetuates the nonsense.
mski011 says
Quick point though. It has already been established that Warren did NOT lie, but more to the point, nothing new has come about in this story since the genealogist confirmed Warren’s story. We should drop it because the RW machine is just spinning nothing at this point.
graydon says
Clearly refers to the Great, Great Great Grandmother, and the Escape is the fact that she found (or someone found for her?) a shred of evidence supporting her family lore.
Still raises the question of why would she self identify as a Native American in a law directory, when clearly she had not done the research on the family lore to support the claim (and does 3% really support the assertion of NA identity?)
BMG community has been trying to spin this as a non-story…… but stories on the topic keep popping up all over the place.
mski011 says
But they’re all the same story. There is no new angle on this. We don’t know that she clearly did not do research. That is speculation.
SomervilleTom says
Sorry, graydon, but there’s no “there” there. Nothing to spin.
On the other hand, I notice that you haven’t followed up on your equally incorrect assertion that Rep. Jim Lyons is not a tax cheat.
The record, that I published in response to your comment, shows that Mr. Lyons failed to pay federal withholding taxes four five consecutive quarters between March of 1996 and March of 1997. He withheld that money from his employees — but used it himself rather than paying the government as he was obligated to do.
That qualifies him as a “tax cheat” in my book. Do you disagree?
The only spinning I see around here is from you (and a handful of other Brown supporters here), the Herald, and the Scott Brown campaign.
graydon says
Clearly Rep Lyons had business issues back in the day based on the documentation you provided. Story also says the liens have been lifted, so he apparently made good on his obligations. Does not say he was ever criminally charged.
In general, I would agree that not paying on payroll taxes in a timely fashion can open oneself up to a whole range of issues with the feds.
But we should be careful not to criminalize failure in business.
And the NYT is not exactly a conservative outlet:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/us/politics/genealogist-finds-record-of-warrens-american-indian-ancestry.html
The diary put forth a theory that the headline was referencing GI’s. I did not see the headline having anything to do with GIs but had everything to do with The Great Great Great Grandma’s Marriage Licence.
SomervilleTom says
I don’t think we should “be careful” about the behavior that Rep. Lyons exemplifies. I said Rep. Lyons was a “tax cheat” — and I stand by that. The fact that he wasn’t criminally charged is secondary.
The point is that Rep Lyons cheated his employees — he took money from their pay checks and used it for his own purposes.
So he gave it back after being hit with the liens — big deal. The federal lien was released on November 6, 2002 — four and a half years after the lien was applied, and six and a half years after he essentially stole the money from his employees.
Suppose an accountant “borrows” over $100,000 from a client, gets caught, and then returns the money six years later — even if the accountant ducks criminal charges, are you really suggesting that “cheat” is an inappropriate characterization?
This isn’t “failure in business”. This is cheating on taxes. An honest executive of a failing business tells his employees that he has to reduce payroll expenses and offers them a choice of a significant reduction in their salary or being laid off. A tax cheat tells his unsuspecting employees that he is withholding federal taxes and then uses that money for himself.
The first is the difficult way of a courageous executive with integrity. The second is, apparently, the way of the GOP (cf Rep. Lyons, Rep. Webster).
I think most of us can see the distinction, even if you don’t.