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Bob Davidson
Tommy,
I was thinking about you saying that you "like" Liz Warren. She is a public figure, a political celebrity, so to speak, and I strongly suspect that you do not know her, and probably have never even met her. By "like" her, I take it that you agree with her politically (as your posts indicate) and therefore believe that you like her. If someone doesn't agree with her political positions, he or she is likely to indicate that they do not "like" her.
Because the senator is a public figure, with her personal life mixed into the public consciousness, she has placed herself into a position where people are going to have an opinion about her personal actions, like any other celebrity. I don't know what, if any, political opinions any of the Kardashians profess, but I have the opinion that they are trashy jerks based on their public image and believe that I am free to say that I don't like them. If you admire their style or behavior, you have no right to be offended by my dislike.
I agree with most of Trump's policy actions, disagree with a few, and don't particularly like his public persona. I disagree with almost all of Biden's policy actions and think he is and has always been a dispicable human being. I agreed with a lot of Mitt Romney's policy proposals, voted for him once, and think he is a disloyal creep personally and so on. I have no right to be offended if you disagree with any of my opinions: I may think you are wrong, but that is not personal unless you make it personal, such as by branding my opinions as evil or immoral.
I'm sure you are familiar with the Overton Window concept. I see the anti-conservative establishment types as trying to trick us by defining any policy that isn't the same as theirs as being outside the acceptable range of ideas. When someone does that, the object of the manipulation has every right to be outraged by the unfairness.
Those things get mixed up easily; I was once at a party with some of my neighbors, back during the Clinton administration. I had just read a book I liked very much comparing FDR and Bill as leaders. A group of us men were standing around the outside grill talking about Clinton, and I brought up the idea that FDR considered himself to be someone with a "second-rate mind surrounding himself with first-rate minds," as opposed to Clinton who always wanted to be the smartest person in the room. I brought up their respective cabinets and got everyone laughing about my philosopher brother-in-law's comment when watching Clinton's cabinet meet -- "Oh boy, the circus is in town."
As I was elaborating, letting my inner reaconteur run a little wild, everyone started laughing including the host. Our host's wife saw us laughing and came over, just in time to hear me describe Lord Benson as the ringmaster of a troupe including an Amazon half woman, a midget, and so on. This woman was at the time the president of our kid's school PTO and a bit humorless. She later became a Houston ISD School Board member and a fairly prominent Houston City Council Member. Instead of joining in the laughter, she told me angrily that my mockery of her brother-in-law was not appreciated and inappropriate. I didn't know who her brother-in-law was, and I didn't have any idea that I'd mocked any real person, only Clinton and his henchmen, so I asked her who she was talking about. She snarled, "The Secretary of HUD is Tim's brother Henry." She stormed off as I was apologizing, probably to tell all the liberal women what a disrespectful little shit I was. Tim, however, said he was going to tell his brother, for a laugh. I, of course, would never have said those things if I'd realized that my neighbor was a close relative of a famous politician.
As I'm writing this, it occurred to me that Liz and her fake Indian ancestry is the root of what's making you feel insulted. Since you only partake of the establishment propaganda outlets, you probably think that Liz Warren is an authentic fellow part-Cherokee. The reality is that she has a history of faking her heritage, like, say, Ward Churchill and Rachel Dolezal: she parlayed a false claim of Native American ancestry to go from a non-tenure track teaching position at UT to tenured professorships in the Ivy League, first at Penn, then Harvard. Both law schools boasted of her as Native American. When she ran for President in 2000, she took a DNA test to prove her ancestry: it came out way, way less than 1% Native American. Anyone who knows this has a very good reason not to like her. (Even a simple Google search will show you these facts.)
It also occurred to me that I may be the only person on this board who has had a personal acquaintence with Senator Warren. I knew her when she was a hot young professor at the University of Houston Law Center (with dark brown hair) and I was yet another beaten into the ground law student. In those days, forty plus years ago, she was the only outspokenly conservative Republican faculty member. I was fresh off a stint as president of the UT Shuttle Bus Drivers' Union and still had the unfortunate Austin mindset. Every Thursday evening, the student bar association sponsored an "arbitration" on the roof of the library: they bought a keg of beer and cups and invited the faculty to hang out with the students for an hour or so. Professor Warren and I got in the habit of arguing politics to the amusement of the rest of the crowd -- we were both a little out of the mainstream of law students (they were mostly moderates of one party or the other but they seemingly enjoyed our recreational arguing).
I don't think she took me personally: her best friend on the faculty was Gene Smith, an old-school Texas liberal who liked to tell the story about how he was responsible for John Tower going into politics: he flunked Tower when he taught at SMU. He'd add that Tower was plenty smart, just not interested in the law. (If you want another reason to think ill of Warren, after he died, she claimed that poor Eugene was a sexual aggressor who chased her around his desk when she was a poor little professorette -- that is an obvious blatant lie: Eugene Smith could barely walk with arm crutches because he's had a bout of polio way back when and Warren was a fit young woman); When we encountered one another she treated me like she liked me -- of course she is a politician so who knows.
She left U of H to take a non-tenure track job at UT becasue her husband was working in Austin and she wanted to be with him. She wasn't an Indian yet.
My point is that I liked Liz Warren personally but do not approve of some of her actions. If you started insulting her personally because she advocated a policy you disagreed with, i could answer based on having known her. If we were still friends, I could have grounds to be insulted.
Sorry for the rambling -- I guess I'm really getting old.
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