Wednesday, February 14, 2018

The Making of Pocahontas’ 2020 Stump Speech

It’s a neat trick Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s pulled off. She leveraged her fictional Native American heritage into a plum spot at Harvard Law School. She leveraged her Harvard job to fenagle a garbage scholarship on a gullible media. And now she has leveraged all of that into a plum Senate seat and transmuted herself into a fake heroine.
No one should be blinded by Warren’s deceit.
So, this morning she made a surprise appearance at the National Congress of American Indians.  Her plan, ostensibly, was to forcefully refute President Trump’s nickname for her and focus on the issue that will never go away─her fraudulent claim of being a Native American.
“I want to start by thanking Chairwoman Andrews-Maltais for that introduction. It has been an honor to work with, to learn from, and to represent the tribes in my home state of Massachusetts, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, the Aquinnah and the Mashpee Wampanoag.”
“I also want to thank President Jefferson Keel, and everyone at the National Congress of American Indians. For over 70 years, you’ve championed the rights and dignity of First Americans and I am honored to be here with you today.”
“I’ve noticed that every time my name comes up, President Trump likes to talk about Pocahontas. So, I figured, let’s talk about Pocahontas. Not Pocahontas, the fictional character most Americans know from the movies, but Pocahontas, the Native woman who really lived, and whose real story has been passed down to so many of you through the generations.”
[SKIP]
“But now we have a president who can’t make it through a ceremony honoring Native American war heroes without reducing Native history, Native culture, Native people to the butt of a joke.”
“The joke, I guess, is supposed to be on me.”
“I get why some people think there’s hay to be made here. You won’t find my family members on any rolls and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.”
“And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes and only by tribes. I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.” 
“But I want to make something else clear too: My parents were real people.”
[Here’s where you and I are supposed to believe that out of 330 million Americans, she and she alone, suffered unimaginable hardships.] 
“By all accounts, my mother was a beauty. She was born in Eastern Oklahoma, on this exact day—Valentine’s Day—February 14, 1912. She grew up in the little town of Wetumka, the kind of girl who would sit for hours by herself, playing the piano and singing. My daddy fell head over heels in love with her.”
“But my mother’s family was part Native American. And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.”
“Together, they survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. They saved up to buy a home. They raised my three older brothers, and they watched as each one headed off to serve in the military. After Daddy had a heart attack and was out of work, after we lost the family station wagon and it looked like we would lose our house, and everything would come crashing down, my mother put on her best dress and walked to the Sears and got a minimum-wage job. That minimum-wage job saved our house and saved our family.”
“My parents struggled. They sacrificed. They paid off medical debts for years. My daddy ended up as a janitor. They fought, and they drank, but more than anything, they hung together. 63 years—that’s how long they were married. When my mother died, a part of my daddy slipped away too.”
“Two years later, I held his hand while cancer took him. The last thing he said was, “It’s time for me to be with your mother.” And he smiled.”
“They’re gone, but the love they shared, the struggles they endured, the family they built, and the story they lived will always be a part of me. And no one—not even the president of the United States—will ever take that part of me away.” 
[SKIP]
“So, I’m here today to make a promise: Every time someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.”

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