One of the best sea shanties is “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” traced to whalers out of Connecticut and Massachusetts in the 1830s, according to folklorist Stan Hugill “Shanties From the Seven Seas” Mystic Seaport Museum.

“Drunken Sailor” is a fine ditty, each repeating verse ten or six beats, followed by the same six beat finish.  The Irish Rovers have a classic rendition.

A modern version is here:

What shall we do with a lame-duck Lizzy,

What shall we do with a lame-duck Lizzy,

What shall we do with a lame-duck Lizzy

early in the morning?

Way-hay, up she rises
Way-hay, up she rises
Way-hay, up she rises
Early in the morning

Put her in the long boat 'til she's sober…

Pull out the bung and wet her all over…

Put her in the scuppers with the deck pump on her…

Early in the morning…

Re-elected only a month ago by Massachusetts voters to her second U.S. Senate term, Warren drunk on self-righteous smugness, has already been declared a “dead presidential candidate walking” by her erstwhile friends.

The NY Times, and Boston Globe -- heretofore slobbering admirers -- last week scuttled any sentiment that she would be piped aboard for a 2020 presidential voyage. Both papers said she forfeited a run to the nomination by stealing and stubbornly lying about her native-American heritage. From the Globe:

“Warren missed her moment in 2016, and there’s reason to be skeptical of her prospective candidacy in 2020. While Warren won reelection, her margin of victory in November suggests there’s a ceiling on her popularity; Baker [Gov Charlie Baker, a liberal Republican] garnered more votes than she did in a state that is supposed to be a Democratic haven”

Her sins are twofold: she is a shameless cultural appropriator, whose fake claim to native-American ancestry for personal gain has been every bit fraudulent as a high-end art forgery, and outright theft.  More egregious, she is the wrong skin color, siphoning 2020 oxygen from the likes of Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Michele Obama.

As Howie Carr wrote in the Boston Herald, “What an ignominious end for Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” and just because it turned out that Elizabeth Warren’s color was white -- alabaster in fact”.

And as PJ Media’s Michael Walsh elaborates on the NY Times Warren hit-piece, partially fingering Donald Trump for Warren’s demise,

“That dastardly Trump, getting the hapless Warren to fall right into his trap! Couldn't she see that simply asserting her native-American identity was enough? That there was no need for DNA tests and all that messy "racial science" when all you had to do was name it and claim it?”

Warren’s unforced error was allowing herself to be needled by Donald Trump, then publicly trying to prove what was always demonstrably false, apparent to everyone but herself.

Elizabeth Warren devoted the better part of the last six years promoting herself -- far afield from Massachusetts -- attending progressive conventions, delivering stump speeches for liberal Dem candidates, hogging press appearances attacking Trump and any and all Trump appointees from Jeff Sessions to Brett Kavanaugh, and making speeches condemning the American justice system as unrepentantly racist.

What did Massachusetts residents garner from having Elizabeth Warren as their senior U.S. senator? Not much, apart from her cosponsoring a Senate resolution congratulating the Red Sox on winning the World Series.

Will Warren occupy her time during the next six years assiduously delivering noteworthy legislative victories for her constituents? Not a chance.

In a long line of inconsequential U.S. senators from the Bay State, Elizabeth Warren is exceptionally well suited to extend that legacy uninterrupted.

You can count on one hand noteworthy senators from Massachusetts since 1788 --John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, JFK, and yes, even Ted Kennedy.  Yet John Quincy was an insufferable intellectual bore; Daniel Webster, while an athletic abolitionist, aligned himself with the noxious 1850 Compromise, betraying the anti-slavery cause. At least Sumner leveraged his affinities to British statesmen by convincing Britain not to give recognition to the Confederacy. JFK didn’t stick around long enough to do much of anything. Ted’s legacy may be the most striking, ignoble as it is.

For the most part, Massachusetts U.S. Senators are a forgettable lot. And so is, and shall be, Elizabeth Warren, unless she is found to have been the mastermind behind the unsolved theft of a Vermeer and several Rembrandts from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  Once a thief, always a thief.

Neither a splash in the face from a fresh-water barrel nor a Nantucket sleigh ride in a long boat will make much difference to lame-duck Lizzy, once drunk on adulations from a fawning media.  Even before the flogging by the NYT and Globe, a UMass poll of Massachusetts residents in late November had Warren trailing Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Way-hay, up she rises…just the tonic for a throbbing hangover.