Here’s the preliminary: Elizabeth Warren is apparently getting knocked for doing something that I’ve done: to wit, reference an uncorroborated family history that has her having a Native American ancestor. I have zero interest in knocking her for it, UNLESS it turns out that she deliberately lied about it, or used it to gain special treatment; and no, I don’t think that letting Harvard mention it in the school paper counts.
But that’s not the QotD. This is:
When President Clinton was still in the White House in 1998, he invited [Native American author Sherman] Alexie and a small group of others to take part in a televised “Dialogue on Race” forum. “He said, ‘Sherman, before I was president, the only thing I knew about Indians was that my grandmother was part Cherokee.’”
“Later on, I was asked if Indians were part of the national dialogue on race. I said ‘No, the only time white folks talk to me about Indians is when they tell me their grandmothers were part Cherokee.’ As the show wore on, I thought ‘Oh, my God, I gave the president s*** — the president!’ Afterwards I was scared and tried to hide — and he came across to me and grabbed me by the shoulder and leaned in close to me and said, ‘Sherman, you’re f***ing funny!’”
Annnnd that’s the difference between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Obama would probably have had the guy audited.
Clinton was a a crooked pol to the bottom of his cankered soul – and he was very good at it. Barry is at least as crooked, but he’s *terrible* at it. He’s a disgrace to the Chicago machine, he is.
All the talk about Obama’s ‘coolness’–empirically, he’s brittle and very, very touchy about it. The friggin’ opposite of cool. Clinton totally rolled with it–liar that he was–and was an excellent off-the-cuff speaker. That, and a pretty good sense of humor are the hallmarks of cool (to me).
And I put Warren’s apocryphal family history in the Rubio catagory–who gives a rat’s patootie.