The CIA-owned and operated Washingtoon Post and some fellow travelers have weighed in on Elizabeth Warren’s Coretta King Senate stunt, and they don’t like it one bit.
Proof positive that she is on the right side.
Here’s the WAPO false news:
Elizabeth Warren is a grandstanding phony
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was right to invoke Rule 19 against Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for her personal harangue against her “friend and colleague” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). Dignity is flowing out of Washington and Warren is doing more than her part as she desperately tries to prove she isn’t just another tiresome Hillary Clinton. What a pretentious, grandstanding phony.
Warren is likely running for president in 2020, and she is trying to rally the embittered left and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) crowd to her side. And her stunt disparaging now-Attorney General Sessions on the Senate floor, plus her tweet threatening that “If Jeff Sessions makes even the tiniest attempt to bring his racism, sexism & bigotry into @TheJusticeDept, he’ll hear from all of us” is a little much, even allowing for a shallow, pandering candidate’s sad attempts to crowd into the news cycle. Is Warren really the guardian of all that is fair and just and the defender of the oppressed? Since when?
Speaking as a proud Alabamian—snip—
I mean…really, folks!!!
A “proud Alabamian!!!???”
I mean…WAPO has been a jokesperson…err, ahhh, I mean spokesperson…for the CIA since the Dulles days, but now? All pretense of leftiness has been dropped.
Hilarious but true.
Read on.
And who is Ed Rogers?
Ed Rogers is a contributor to the PostPartisan blog, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and several national campaigns. He is the chairman of the lobbying and communications firm BGR Group, which he founded with former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour in 1991. Follow @EdRogersDC
And what is the BGR Group?
BGR Group is a lobbying firm based in Washington DC, three blocks from the White House, and also has an office in London.[1] The firm was founded in 1991 by Ed Rogers and Haley Barbour.[2]
In 2013 the firm was paid $13.7 million for lobbying and its three largest clients were the Republic of India, Ukraine Chevron Corp. and the State of Kazakhstan.[3] The firm employs various former political figures including Ambassador Kurt Volker, Jeffrey Birnbaum, and Gov. Haley Barbour.[4] Rick Kessler, a lobbyist working for BGR Group was running for a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in May, 2014.[5]
In 2014 Huffington Post reported that BGR Group was “at the center of [a] lobbyist network” supporting Republican Senator Thad Cochran, while he fought a tight primary election race against Tea Party candidate, Chris McDaniel.[6]
In April 2015, the Government of South Korea retained BGR for public relations and image building.[7][8]
Nice.
Just another DC deep state revolving door operation.
Thar’s gold in them thar shills!!!
I mean…maybe she is a “grandstanding phony.” But isn’t that an important part of the job description for success in American politics?
Haley Barbour isn’t?
Please!!!
Tobacco matters
Barbour’s taxation policies have come under scrutiny. The “Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids” insinuated that Barbour’s lobbying-era affinity with the tobacco industry may also explain his 2006 proposal to dismantle Mississippi’s controversial youth-tobacco-prevention program, called The Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi, although the political motives of this group’s leadership has been called into question by Barbour supporters.[53]
Barbour has also received criticism from some Mississippi Democrats for his refusal to approve a bill to increase the cigarette tax and decrease the grocery tax passed by the Mississippi House of Representatives during his first term as governor. Mississippi currently has the third-lowest cigarette tax and the highest grocery tax–while being the poorest state in the country. He stated that the lack of revenue generated after the tax swap would quite possibly result in bankrupting the state government, which was already fragile due to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. The House of Representatives could produce no figures to dispute this assertion. Also, in his successful 2004 campaign, Barbour ran on the platform that he would veto any tax increase.[54]
In May 2009, Barbour followed the State Tax Commission’s recommendation and signed into law the state’s first increase since 1985, from 18 cents to 68 cents per pack. The tax is estimated to generate more than $113 million for the year that begins July 1, 2009.[55]
—snip—
Race and integration
Barbour has faced considerable “in-state criticism for his approach to racial issues”.[58] Mississippi state Representative Willie Perkins has “compared Barbour to the southern Democrats who preceded him”, saying: “As far as I’m concerned, he has never done anything as a governor or a citizen to distinguish himself from the old Democrats who fought tooth and nail to preserve segregation.”[58]
In 2006, he declined to posthumously pardon Clyde Kennard, an African-American civil rights pioneer, after evidence was presented that Kennard had been falsely convicted of burglary in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1960. Instead, Barbour designated a Clyde Kennard Day, calling for remembrance of Kennard’s “determination, the injustices he suffered, and his significant role in the history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi”.[59] Barbour subsequently joined in a petition for a court rehearing of the case that resulted in the original conviction being thrown out.[60]
Barbour proved instrumental in winning state legislative support for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Legislation to fund a state museum had been introduced every year since 2000,[61] but died for various reasons. In November 2006, Barbour proposed creating a state commission to develop plans for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.[62] In his “State of the State” address on January 16, 2007, Barbour said the museum was “overdue, and it needs doing”,[63] The proposal won legislative approval, and a site for the museum was selected in March 2008.[64] The project then stalled for three years,[65] however, with museum backers listing lack of direction from the governor’s office and Barbour’s refusal to spend $500,000 in museum planning funds as part of the reason why.[66] Barbour also declined to name a museum commission to oversee the final push for funding and construction.[67] Barbour announced in late 2010 that he would run for president of the United States. Then in an interview with The Weekly Standard neoconservative newsmagazine, Barbour appeared to minimize the oppressiveness of racial intolerance in Mississippi when he characterized the White Citizens’ Council in his hometown of Yazoo City as merely “an organization of town leaders” that kept more radical anti-integrationist elements (like the Ku Klux Klan) at bay.[68] In what many political observers felt was an attempt to disassociate himself from Mississippi’s racially intolerant past as well as to dampen the criticism over his remarks, Barbour again declared his complete support for construction of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.[69] The museum secured $20 million in funding from the Mississippi Legislature in April 2011 after Barbour personally testified in favor of its funding.[70]
During an April 11, 2010, appearance on CNN, host Candy Crowley asked if it had been insensitive for Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to omit mentioning slavery in a proposed recognition of Confederate History Month. Barbour replied, “To me, it’s a sort of feeling that it’s a nit, that it is not significant, that it’s not a–it’s trying to make a big deal out of something doesn’t amount to diddly.”[71] Barbour continued, “I don’t know what you would say about slavery … but anybody that thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing, I think that goes without saying.”[72]
In December 2010, Barbour was interviewed by The Weekly Standard magazine. Asked about coming of age in Yazoo City during the civil rights era, he told the interviewer regarding growing up there, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”[73] Barbour then credited the White Citizens’ Council for keeping the KKK out of Yazoo City and ensuring the peaceful integration of its schools. Barbour dismissed comparisons between the White Citizens’ Councils and the KKK, and referred to the Councils as “an organization of town leaders”. Barbour continued in his defense of the Councils, saying, “In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.” Barbour’s statement did not address the role of the white supremacist group in publicly naming and blacklisting individuals who petitioned for educational integration[74] and how it used political pressure and violence to force African-American residents to move.[75] This led to a considerable outcry in which critics such as Rachel Maddow accused Barbour of whitewashing history.[76] In response to criticism, Barbour issued a statement declaring Citizens’ Councils to be “indefensible.”[77]
In what some[who?] have speculated was an attempt at damage control just days after the interview, Barbour suspended the prison sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two African American women who received life sentences resulting from a 1993 mugging in which the two women stole $11.[78][79] Barbour has denied that there was any connection between the suspension of the Scott sisters’ prison sentence and the controversy surrounding his Weekly Standard interview. Jamie Scott suffered from kidney failure while in prison, and requires a donated organ, which her sister Gladys had volunteered to provide. Barbour’s decision to release the Scott sisters, however, is contingent upon the promised organ donation by Gladys Scott, which critics argued amounted to coercion and raises questions of medical ethics.[80]
The Denver Post weighs in, too.
First of all, despite the martyr act, no one has the power to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And that’s a good thing. On the other hand, the impulse to silence Warren is completely rational, and it has nothing to do with her gender, ancestry or ideology. It has everything to do with her sanctimonious lecturing, habitual dishonesty and disregard for norms. She’s been a bully her entire career.
—snip—
Warren as the voice of the left might be the best-case scenario for Republicans. For one thing, she is no Barack Obama on the charisma front. For another, she saves conservatives the trouble of going after socialist straw men. They’ll have a real one.
Of course, the equally CIA-controlled rightiness wing of the DC deep state had to weigh in as well. Here is The National Review’s little contribution:
Elizabeth Warren’s Secrets and Lies
Warren will stop at nothing to shield the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from scrutiny. After all, it’s her signature accomplishment, and she has a political future to think about.
Last Friday, President Trump signed an executive order listing “Core Principles” for reforming financial regulation, including the Democrats’ 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau it created. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren could hardly object to some of the principles — for example, “prevent taxpayer-funded bailouts” or “empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace” — because she herself had previously expressed similar sentiments. So instead, she quickly accused Republicans of “rushing to unleash the big banks” and “gut the consumer agency that has forced banks to give $12 billion back to customers they cheated.”
It’s time to retire these slurs, which Democrats have used for five years to attack any Republican who criticizes the CFPB or suggests ways to fix it. The vast majority of Republicans are not billionaires, or even millionaires, but they are all consumers, and they don’t enjoy being defrauded any more than Democrats do. Understanding economics and opposing policies that harm rather than protect consumers do not make one a bank worshipper.
—snip—
Senator Warren’s reputation rests largely on the CFPB, and she knows what the bureau is hiding. She’d like to keep those secrets hidden until her reelection to the Senate in 2018 — and perhaps a bigger race in 2020.
There are more, of course. Read ’em yourselves:
EXCLUSIVE: Gravy Train Flows Wide And Deep At Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Agency
Elizabeth Warren is doing it wrong
The more they attack her, the better she looks.
Later…
AG
P.S. Davis X Machina comments below:
By virtue of being a major-party Senator, isn’t Senator Warren actually part of the Deep State? Or at least the PermaGov?
And if she isn’t, why hasn’t she been silenced by same?Perhaps it’s because…. she’s just another politician?
Here on this leftiness blog, it is almost de rigeur to occupy the position that “The Deep State” actually consists of the two major parties and that the DemRats are the good guys. The reason that I have stopped commenting is precisely that position…I got tired of being downrated and insulted for suggesting that both parties are equally suspect and that neither one is to be trusted.
However, Trump’s election and the RatPublicans’ control…assumed control, anyway…of the White House and Congress has shattered the effective monolith of the DemRat Party. (At least it was effective enough to deny Bernie Sanders a any chance primary win as far as I am concerned.) Thus the quite politically and publicity-savvy Elizabeth Warren has seen an entry point into perhaps lessening if not totally divorcing the Dems’ position in the Deep State, much as has the equally savvy and much more potentially destructive Donald Trump.
Has she herself been “part of the Deep State?”
Yes, just as a thorn in your foot becomes a “part” of you if not successfully excised.
She seems to see an entryway to real power over the next four years, and her anti-corporatist instincts are right of point as fas as I am concerned.
Will she be able to remain “pure” and still acquire power?
Of course not.
Is she better than the Clintonian neolibs?
I think so, myself.
Much better.
Were she to run in 2020, it would most certainly not be the same kind of Scylla and Charybdis choice that we were offered in 2016.
Not by a long shot.
Bet on it.
