Elizabeth Warren, Senate candidate from Massachusetts, was recently asked if she considers Scott Brown, the incumbent Republican, to be honorable.  Her somewhat ambiguous answer was "That's not a question for me."  Does she mean that it is not her place to say?  Or does she mean she wouldn't recognize honorable if she tripped over it?

Exactly who is Elizabeth Warren?

She is a law professor at Harvard.  She was Obama's consumer czar and set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), fully expecting to become its first director.  President Obama was forced to replace her because of opposition in the Senate to her extremist views.  Ms. Warren returned to Massachusetts and is running against Scott Brown for senator from that state.

Professor Warren, speaking about Occupy Wall Street, claims, "I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do."  She can also claim credit for inspiring President Obama's telltale gaffe "You didn't build that" (see Obama in context here).

One more thing: Elizabeth Warren is perhaps the whitest woman of color on the face of the earth. 

The July 2012 issue of the Limbaugh Letter has an article on Ms. Warren titled "Dishonest Injun."  She claims Cherokee ancestry based on family lore but without a scintilla of documented evidence.  Certainly not enough evidence to, in her own words, "let people know about my Native American heritage in a national directory of law school personnel."

Boston attorney and pundit Wendy Murphy implies that Ms. Warren's academic pedigree (Ms. Warren went to 82^nd-ranked Rutgers-Newark School of Law) would not normally be up to Harvard's exalted standards.  Writing in the Quincy (MA) Patriot Ledger, Ms. Murphy said:

Warren ... knows that law professors far more qualified than she don't even apply for positions at Harvard because they know that being a genius is not enough. Academic pedigree matters more, and she didn't have the right credentials. By listing herself as a minority in a national directory of law school personnel she was effectively putting a glowing neon "pick me" sign next to her name for universities looking to increase their quotas on minority hires.

The Warren campaign put forward an undated newspaper article that showed that Elizabeth Warren's cousin contributed to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma.  The cousin had published a cookbook called Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek & Seminole.  It turns out that five of the recipes were contributed by "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee."

Curiouser and curiouser.  Boston talk show host Howie Carr found that two of the "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee" recipes are similar -- almost identical -- to two recipes by NY Times syndicated columnist Chef Pierre Frainey.  Follow the link and compare them yourself.

Ah, the dangers of verifiable claims.  Doug Powers recommends, "Next time make it something that is unverifiable" and points to Ms. Warren's assertion that "I was the first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey" as an example.  There are other unverifiable assertions; Ms. Warren thrives on blowing her own horn -- see how good I am, see how unique I am.  My favorite is "When I started law school here at Rutgers in 1973, I had never met a lawyer."  She shoulda been so lucky.

High crimes and misdemeanors?  Hardly -- more an interminable farce from Saturday Night Live.  These things are fun to ridicule, but not disqualifying for public office.  Most of us have analogous conceits, and we deal with them with self-deprecating humor.  It is Elizabeth Warren's reaction that is illuminating.  The dishonest Injun meme broke in late April, months ago.  It is still going strong because Ms. Warren has not been able to put it behind her.  When queried, she puts on her petulant professorial pout and stonewalls.  Her honor has been impugned.  As Joe Fitzgerald tells us in the Boston Herald, "[t]he heat of this political season is telling us much about the professor, and it isn't very flattering."

Professors, like doctors, are God-like creatures.  Ms. Warren fervently believes she is smarter, better, more deserving than the rest of us.  There is no need for self-deprecating humor.  She has no flaws for which to apologize.  Look her up in a thesaurus; patronizing, pedantic, plodding, ponderous, priggish, professorial.

Remind you of anybody?  BHO? 

If you don't like ObamaCare, it is because you don't understand ObamaCare, and if you were not so lazy, you could learn to understand and to love ObamaCare.  Haven't we had enough of that dictatorial bully-pulpit approach? 

Ms. Warren's background parallels Mr. Obama's in many ways. 

• As we have just seen, Mr. Obama and Ms. Warren are so damn smart that they get extremely upset when we, the dim-witted, are slow in comprehending their brilliance. Both Mr. Obama and Ms. Warren appear to be get-even as well as get-angry personalities.
• Mr. Obama and Ms. Warren each have an imperative: a pursuit for a racial identity. In each case, the results of the search are conveyed in a very much less than verifiable manner.
• Mr. Obama and Ms. Warren each have an extremely narrow life experience for governance; Mr. Obama as a community organizer and an academic, Ms. Warren as strictly an academic. Look at how well Mr. Obama's lack of experience has served us. Expect the same or worse from Ms. Warren.
• Mr. Obama's and Ms. Warren's biggest and scariest convergence is not on personal attributes, but rather on ideology. Each is a left-wing zealot. Each is a one-percenter eager to redistribute your wealth to the ninety-nine percent.

America was once the land of opportunity, of individual achievement, of exceptionalism.  America used to be a home that engendered pride of accomplishment, the dignity of strength, and the honor of morality.

When did all that change?  We now seem to be a nation of dependents, a realm of serfs, a country of apologists.  The trend in this direction started some time ago, but it took Barack Obama acting as a catalyst to dramatically speed up the process.  Obama has brought down upon us a quasi-Marxist economy, a distribute-the-wealth philosophy, and a "you didn't build that" leftist ideology.  As Mark Steyn so starkly puts it, we totter near "the last exit ramp before the death spiral."

Give Barack Obama a second term -- a term about which Obama says, "This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility" -- and there will be nothing to impede the spiral.  (See Kimberly Strassel's article "The Silent Second-Term Agenda.")  There may be no United States of America to save by 2016, but Ms. Warren is standing in the wings, ready to finish off anything that Obama overlooks.

The Atlantic recently ran an article by Molly Ball in which she posed the question, "Elizabeth Warren for President?" 

Ms. Ball had attended "a conference of liberal activists ... hoping to find out who the party's activist base sees as its up-and-coming stars."  The conference was called "Take Back the American Dream" and held in Washington 18-20 June 2012.  One is known by the company she keeps.  Among the progressive devotees attending were Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim member of Congress, who has been described in a blog posting on PowerLine in 2009 as "helping to raise money for an Islamist organization with ties to terrorist organization"; Van Jones, the self-avowed communist, who had to resign as Mr. Obama's green jobs czar because his leftist positions were embarrassing even for Mr. Obama; and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the self-avowed socialist who lists himself as independent because the Democratic Party is too far to the right for his liking.

Per Ms. Ball's article, Elizabeth Warren "ran away with" the straw poll for 2016 presidential candidate held at the conference. 

There are two ways to remove the specter of Elizabeth Warren from our future.  Either beat her in her bid for the Senate or beat her mentor, Barack Obama, in his bid for a second term.  Ideally, we should do both.

The citizens of Massachusetts have a special responsibility, one I fear they may not be able to fulfill, to vote down Ms. Warren and to keep the highly capable Republican Scott Brown in the Senate.

Those of us in states that have not yet plunged down Mr. Steyn's "Death Spiral" must defeat Barack Obama in November.

Mike Johnson is a concerned citizen, a small-government conservative, and a live-free-or-die resident of New Hampshire.  E-mail mnosnhoj@comcast.net.