OPINION

Why We Really Should Be Calling Elizabeth Warren Fauxcahontas

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Isn't it delicious that Fauxcahontas, aka Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- the liberal Massachusetts Democrat toying with a 2020 presidential run -- is refusing to take a DNA test to finally prove whether her self-serving claims of Cherokee heritage are true?

Actually, watching Warren squirm and Chuck Todd all but flagellate himself for having to ask about the DNA test on "Meet the Press" was more than delicious.

It was tasty, kind of like a French omelet with crab meat at a fancy restaurant frequented by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

"I know who I am, and never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere," Warren said, protesting too much.

Oh, no, of course not.

She just claimed Native American status while teaching law at Harvard, and Harvard flaunted it as proof of faculty diversity. It's all about checking the right racial boxes.

And until she takes that DNA test -- or releases the findings to show that she is indeed part Cherokee -- it will dog her, like some rogue beast of liberal Democratic identity politics, trotting behind her wherever she goes.

The liberal Democratic Media Complex does not love this story. But Warren's DNA drama gets to the heart of the thing.

Democrats are thoroughly dominated by the hard left now, and except for bizarre socialist economics drawn from "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," they're all about identity politics all the time.

The Democratic Party is hip-deep in the politics of race and gender, and uses these as tools to carve and parcel out power, resources and benefits, relying on skin pigments and chromosomes (or the lack thereof), grievance and victimhood.

Identity politics has been the left's recipe for years, and watching Warren squirm was just the thing to whet the appetite. Not like a Bobby Flay burger exactly, or a Dutch oven full of Gordon Ramsay's epic spicy lamb shanks, or Jacques Pepin's Oeufs En Cocotte.

Rather it was something like "Cold Omelets with Crab Meat," an alleged down-home, authentic Cherokee recipe submitted by Warren for a book weirdly titled "Pow Wow Chow" just a few years ago.

Yes, there is such a book, still available on Amazon. And no, you can't make this stuff up.

It turns out that Cold Omelets with Crab Meat, Warren's "Pow Wow Chow" Native American recipe, might not actually have been all that big along the infamous Cherokee Trail of Tears. It was, however, a favorite treat of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and of Cole Porter at Le Pavillon restaurant in New York decades ago.

And it was most likely lifted -- you might say she Joe Bidened it -- from a 1979 New York Times piece by Chef Pierre Franey.

"...to make matters worse," wrote Politifact in 2017, "some of the (Warren) recipes appear to have been copied from The New York Times wire service."

The Boston Herald's Howie Carr wrote he found three pilfered Warren recipes in the Native American cookbook.

"They ought to change the name of the next edition of 'Pow Wow Chow' to 'Pow Wow Ciao,' and Granny Warren can write a farewell address to any moonbats left who believe anything she says," wrote Carr.

Ouch.

On NBC the other day, Todd didn't dare go there. Instead, he cited an editorial by the Berkshire Eagle, a paper that endorsed her campaign for Senate in 2012, asking her to take the DNA test.

"So we call upon our senior senator to screw up her courage and take the spit test," the Eagle said in an editorial. "If she already has but is keeping the results under wraps, we urge her to be forthcoming with them. She has nothing to lose but her Achilles' heel."

DNA racial preference tests will become law sooner or later when the left -- having already seized the culture -- finally macerates the Constitution.

If Warren's party has its way, the melding of big government and big business will ultimately bring us chips in our necks for workplace efficiency, and DNA tests to determine government benefits, and IQ tests in utero to determine if we'll be allowed to live.

Even before then, we'll have driverless cars to keep us safe.

Me? I'd rather take a Mach I Mustang and head on down the highway.

What's embarrassing is that President Donald Trump insists on calling her "Pocahontas." But Pocahontas was not a liberal Democrat who pilfered French crab omelet recipes. She was the daughter of a chief near the Jamestown colony in the 1600s. Legend says she saved the life of Capt. John Smith, one of those Christian fundamentalists with guns.

Elizabeth Warren would never, ever do that.

So best we call her Fauxcahontas, in honor of her French omelet recipes.

In a 2009 paper titled "The Politics of Genomics Research: The Implications of DNA for Racial Identity and Race-based Medicine," authors Jennifer L. Hochschild and Maya Sten of Harvard cited several cases of vanity DNA tests gone wild.

Texan Danny Villarreal proudly thought himself to be of Hispanic blood. But a DNA test showed otherwise. "Danny Villarreal is (genetically, at least) an Ashkenazi Jew," they wrote. Professor Henry Louis Gates discovered that he was not Yoruba as he hoped, but that a "number of exact matches turned up, leading straight back to that African Kingdom called Northern Europe."

The paper also cited California High School principal Wayne Joseph, who thought he was black, until a DNA test ruled otherwise. Before the test, he said, "I was unequivocally black. Now I'm a metaphor for America."

Exactly. And what's wrong with that?

Nothing.

We don't need DNA tests to tell us the only thing that counts:

We're Americans.