Trump mocks Elizabeth Warren’s heritage AND #metoo

[Dill]

(02-07-2019, 08:42 AM)hollodero Wrote: Digging up the lie also can be called journalism. That it's diminishing her candidacy is on her, not on the digger.
Trump lies on a far bigger scale, sure, and devout Trump voters calling her a liar and hence unfit for office look ridiculous indeed. I don't argue that.

Yes. Good point.  It is not "fake news" when the press is doing its job when it runs background checks on candidates.

(02-07-2019, 08:42 AM)hollodero Wrote: Yes.
Then again, when someone else called said Trump voter all kinds of stuff because of his constant lies and now doesn't see that big of an issue with Warren, he opens himself up to critizism of hypocrisy.
That whole "holier than you"-lines - which I do believe are warranted - would go out the window in the eyes of said Trump voters, and to a degree I couldn't really blame them.
Warren's lie is not a minor issue and to me is disqualifying. And sure, Trump's baggage was even way more disqualifying, but this is about the democratic side, not the republican side. That it is disqualifying has nothing to do with Trump. If it had, Trump would have sustainably lowered the standard.

I agree that when we are considering Warren on her own merits, this has nothing to do with Trump. But it will have something to do with Trump if she wins the Democratic nomination and I must choose between two "liars."

Then, as now, I have three questions regarding Warren.  One is, is she qualified? --i.e., does she know how government works?  Also, what are her values, what kind of policies would she work for, and what kind of people would she appoint to her cabinet?  Finally, what is her character? Is she honest? Can we trust her to do what she says? 

She fulfills the former two, but it is not clear to me yet that she fails the latter. To fail that, she would exhibit a tendency to lie or persist in a single really bad lie. Lots of people in the US select identity from some claimed or actual past heritage.  The question in her case is whether is 1) did she know she was NOT a Native American and claim she was, and 2) did she make this claim to advance her career?  She has publicly presented herself as having Native American heritage, as told by her parents. And there is even a bit of genetic evidence to support that. So long as she hasn't claimed membership in a tribe, I don't have a big problem with that. There is still no evidence that she applied for a job as a Native American and got it for that reason.  Rather, she appears to have been a rather brilliant law professor and researcher, who got her job that way.  

The only problem I see so far is that this personal claim to NA heritage may have been leveraged by Harvard and Texas to assess their own diversity quotas, perhaps denying a minority hire years after Warren was already hired.  Still waiting on that one.  That would be bad if she knew about it.

I don't think I am opening myself to charges of "hypocrisy" if I say Warren's record of lying seems, so far, not as "big an issue" as Trump's.  His lies affect policy, undermine US institutions, the way our Allies see us, advance the agendas of US adversaries, etc.

I do agree, though, that in the eyes of Trump voters and defenders, this distinction, this difference in degree, goes out the window if one or any Democratic candidate can be shown to have lied about something--hired an illegal immigrant or paid less taxes, or tweeted a gay slur 15 years ago and then denied it.  Hence the equivocating attack on standards as "subjective."

(02-07-2019, 08:42 AM)hollodero Wrote: That's where I would disagree. I don't think it's completely subjective, and to a certain extent lies and amount of lies can be measured. Trump is said to have told what, 8.000 demonstrable lies now while in office, or to say 10-15 lies or falsehoods per day (maybe the numbers are questionable, the statement behind it is not) and remains far less trustworthy than Warren, and I would consider it strange to see it differently.
He actually makes up anything on the fly... like how Finland told him to rake the forest floors. This is pathological and Warren is not in the same spheres.

Yes, lies can be counted, and counts are quantifiable.  If I say that 50 lies is more than one, most would not call that "subjective" if we can get them to agree that fifty of anything is more than one of that thing.

Your reference to raking forest floors brings up the question of degree. I could throw in others, like the 3-5 million illegals voting in the last election.
It rather stretches credulity to suppose we can determine no degree of magnitude between those lies and the claim of a person with at least one NA ancestor to NA ancestry. 

This is not a simple matter though, as sometimes what counts as a lie, and whether one lie is "worse" than another, must be referred to or involve value judgments. There is always an opening for equivocation.

One of the reasons this era is termed "post truth" is precisely because people work so hard to deny any kind of standard or measure for judging policies and statements beyond "gut instinct."