The problem with Elizabeth Warren is that the deliberate lie is harder to defend than the one told by a "pathological" liar

Given Donald Trump’s escape into a lurid nightmare world of his own making, where his “reality” is whatever he says it is as long as it helps to convince himself that he is a “very stable genius”—instead of a man who simply reacts to unfamiliar or negative stimuli like a new-born baby or a feral animal—the need to get him out of office before he commits permanent damage to democratic principles and the Constitution cannot be gainsaid. Republicans like Rep. Jim Jordan can run amok like mindless ants whose nest has been disturbed, but that only underscores the way they have tied themselves to Trump like lemmings headed to a cliff. 

Unless another whistleblower or two—meaning true, rather than fake, patriots—emerge to make moot the Trump administration’s refusal to defend its clearly unconstitutional and unethical  activities for personal gain, preferring to resort to deliberate perjury, omission of relevant facts and disseminating the latest far-right conspiracy theories, the only way the country will be rid of this foul pestilence currently occupying the White House is voting Trump and his familiars out of office in 2020. 

The problem is who is the person Democrats need to do it. While Joe Biden continues to be ahead in the polls for the Democratic nomination, some people may legitimately wonder if he is still “all there.” I personally am not “too” concerned about that, since when people get older their memory tends to omit things, and that is true of almost everyone. We can assume that Biden retains enough of his faculties from long experience in government service (including as vice president) that he knows the difference between right and wrong, and will surround himself (unlike Trump) with people who will provide intelligent policy advice that is good for the country, and not merely for himself. 

Still, there seems to be a preference by many in the media to push Elizabeth Warren to the head of the pack. I’m not sure to what degree voters should be concerned about the snivelings we hear from Wall Street that corporate America would rather stomach another Trump administration than a potential Warren administration, but Warren has a bigger problem, methinks, and it is one we keep forgetting was a problem Hillary Clinton had in 2016: telling the truth.

How soon we forget that there were actually experts in the field of psychiatry who were debating whether Hillary fit the description of a “pathological” liar. We are not talking about someone who just tells lies that he or she knows are lies to avoid a reckoning; we are talking about someone who lives in an alternate fact universe, using it instinctively to counteract negative stimuli. Did I just mention that this is Trump’s mode of “governance”? Were we not concerned in 2016 that Hillary Clinton would be doing exactly what Trump is doing now to conceal his wrongdoing?

That is why anti-Trump voters should not be wishing for a Hillary “comeback” if they hope to beat him. Sure, she is making the rounds before adoring audiences because she seems like she would have been the better alternative—in a policy way perhaps, but as past evidence suggests, certainly not ethically or even constitutionally. So desperate were Hillary supporters in and out of the media of getting her elected president (to make “history”) in 2016, that they conveniently “forgot” about the many instances of unethical activities that she had a personal hand in as First Lady. We may laugh at Melania Trump’s inability to explain what her shoe-horned “be best” program is outside reading off a teleprompter, and we can laugh at the right’s inability to concoct a “scandal” around Michelle Obama, but we can’t laugh at Hillary Clinton’s Trump-like attitude toward ethical behavior, concealment and telling facts straight and true.

Now back to Warren, who also has a problem with the truth, although not necessarily the “pathological” variety as Trump and Clinton suffer from; Warren’s untruths seem to be more “calculated.” For years she claimed to have “Native American” blood in her system; real Native Americans (as well as indigenous peoples from Mexico and Central America) would point out that beyond this unproven claim, Warren’s plainly Caucasoid appearance has shielded her from the troubles and tribulations that they have suffered from at the hands of whites like herself past and present. What exactly Warren hoped to gain from this claim of being more “native” than other white people is hard to ascertain; if she hoped to establish “cred” with minorities, it was an abject failure.

Warren has also been working the gender card on two other claims of questionable merit, one of them apparently another deliberate lie. She has been going about claiming that women have a very hard time being elected to Congress, and the U.S. Senate in particular. She has pointed to her own election to the Senate as something of a “miracle” for “women’s rights,” but given that there are 25 women currently serving in the Senate, this puts an asterisk next to her self-serving definition of “miracle.”  I’ve been living in the state of Washington for 28 years (but still a Packer fan), and it seems like Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell have been the state’s tag-team U.S. Senators for almost that long, and same goes for California, which also has had two female senators for quite a while. Playing the gender victim card here will not work any better than it did for Hillary.

But that could be called a lie of “omission.” Warren’s claim that she was “fired” from a teaching job in New Jersey when she was young because of pregnancy appears to be an outright, calculated lie—unless, of course she, like Biden, is “suffering” from memory lapses. Warren apparently worked at her “dream” job of teaching special education kids for a year before this alleged firing. But it turns out from a reading of the minutes taken at a school board meeting that the board accepted Warren’s resignation “with regret” from that post that she had already been approved for a second year; her next “job” came soon afterward: admission to Rutgers Law School, which some former college classmates suggested she do.

Why did Warren tell such a bald-faced lie? In this country, white men are 1A in social standing, and white women are 1B. Yet many white women—even those doing very well for themselves—insist on playing the gender victim card when it doesn’t apply, and Warren is a prime example of this. It is doubly troublesome when to do so requires a lie so transparent that when it is found out, it makes it appear that the “victim” is only trying to victimize others by libeling them, in this case presumably the male members of the school board in question. 

Who knows how many more deliberate lies that Warren has told on the campaign trail. One thing is for certain: a deliberate distortion of the truth can actually be worse than a lie told by a “pathological” liar who actually believes what they say is true, because it is much harder to defend the deliberate lie. If Warren is nominated, she—and those of us who hope Trump isn’t allowed another four years to cement the damage he has caused—better hope that she hasn’t told too many more. Uber-feminist commentators like the The Guardian's Jill Filipovic can keep lying to themselves that major ethical lapses in their favorite candidate is merely a misogynist ""smear" campaign, but in her latest hit piece she has the audacity to baldly lie that there was no "paper" trail to "prove" that Warren's latest lie isn't one. This kind of hysterical denial of truth doesn't just brand gender fanatics like Filipovic (and Warren) as wholly lacking in credibility, but they prove why we shouldn't trust them running the country, either.