In a political maneuver that even her fellow Democrats are decrying as poorly timed, Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced this week that she has DNA proof to substantiate her claims to American Indian heritage.  Apparently, Donald Trump has been living inside Lizzie's head with his disparaging label for her, Pocahontas, a term ridiculing her suspect assertion that she is part Cherokee Indian.  The fact that Warren is originally from Oklahoma had made such a native heritage sufficiently plausible until she entered the national political arena.  She had played it to advantage for years in academia to gain preferential treatment and a lucrative sinecure on the Harvard faculty.

But when Warren left the protections of that academic reservation and entered the much larger and more dangerous open range of national politics as a liberal Democrat, her claimed privilege by birthright became an easy target of opportunity for her political opposition, forcing her to defend it with laughably weak protestations.  She had long and wisely avoided Republican demands for a DNA test as proof until now, but Trump's continuing Poca, Poca, Poca ridicule must have made her and her advisers realize that this problem had to be dealt with before she had any chance of running for the presidency in 2020.

Thus, Warren publicly, boastfully announced recently that DNA testing (by a friend and political supporter) had, in fact, conclusively proved her claim to Indian princess fame.  Warren, assisted by the leftist media, confidently badgered Donald Trump to pay up on an offer he had made previously to pay her $1,000,000 if she took a DNA test that proved her American Indian ancestry.  But the ever clever POTUS quickly countered with a tweet ridiculing the tenuous DNA result that Warren saw as definitive, calling it "bogus" and pointing out that her reported 1/1024 share was even being mocked by Cherokee Nation leadership.  He ended that tweet with a damning and exclamatory "Phony!"  Trump followed that tweet minutes later with another calling on Warren to apologize to the country for her blatant fraud against the American public.  Even worse for Warren was criticism from her own party, with some prominent Dems faulting her inept timing.

Therein lies Lyin' Lizzie's dilemma.  Trump's ongoing campaign of Pocahontas taunts has goaded her into foolishly checkmating herself in this extended game of Cherokee Chess.  With her acquiescence to Trump's demands for DNA evidence, she has provided proof not of American Indian heritage, but rather proof of her cunning willingness to take advantage of minority affirmative action programs for personal gain.  Sure, she can continue to fight and deny, citing the suspect DNA report, trying to tamp down the derision, while meantime providing Democrat presidential contenders, a few of whom are likely to be minorities, with fodder to charge her with crass racial and cultural appropriation, a most serious sin among the politically correct.  Or she can throw herself on the untender mercies of the merciless left and publicly apologize for the fraud she has long perpetrated, hoping for some traces of compassion in those Alinsky-hardened hearts.  Either way, she's game over on that path to the 2020 Democrat nomination.

Is it cultural appropriation for the Great White Father to have outplayed Pocahontas at Cherokee Chess?

Image: Stefan Schubert via Flickr.