Biggest joke of 2012

The Occupy Wall Street hoopla earned the title of Biggest Joke of 2011 after it managed to accomplish nothing except extensive property damage, rape, intoxication and spectacle.

This year, Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. Senate candidate from Massachusetts, has all but engraved her name on the trophy. She’ll clench the prize if she loses in November.
Warren is the darling of Left, especially for her ideas about who creates wealth in the United States.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” she declared.

She has equally strong views of what one can and cannot do with the money he earns.

“Part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that (money) and pay forward (with taxes) for the next kid who comes along.”

While her unhealthy love for the government makes them swoon, the thing the Left finds especially sexy about Warren is her supposed Native American heritage.

The pale, blue-eyed blonde claims to be one-thirty-second Cherokee despite her lack of any corroborating evidence outside the “family lore” that relates relatives who had “high cheekbones, like all of the Indians do.”

Many claim  Warren used the bogus identity to land a job at Harvard University, which, like most academic institutions, obsesses about “diversifying” its student body and faculty, as if the more varied the skin tones in a community, the more diverse the intellectual discourse necessarily will be.

Warren’s alleged heritage has become a central theme her campaign has had to deflect.

They do so mostly by calling it a distraction from the real issues.

Perhaps it should seem silly that the media have focused so intently on the issue of one-thirty-seconds of Warren’s heritage, yet the issue goes well beyond that.

Warren’s plunge into the affirmative action pool is important because it illustrates the absurdity of a tenet of liberalism: identity politics.

The way Warren was able to get ahead in life based on an unsubstantiated claim to minority ancestry is liberalism in action.

Rather than focus on a person’s substance, his distinct character, opinions and ideas, identity politics teaches us to categorize a person based on appearance, namely his race.

Affirmative action teaches minorities they are defined not by who they are now but who their ancestors were.

Is it really beneficial to anyone to foster a sense of entitlement simply due to their skin color? Shouldn’t we encourage all to work hard and earn their success?

Furthermore, what if universities concerned themselves as much with diversity of thought as they fret about diversity of skin color?

Affirmative action may have been conceived with the noblest reparative intentions, but it has outlived its usefulness.

Playing the victim got Warren and others so far in life, and because there is no end in sight to this identity politics madness, I might as well try it myself.

So, here it is, my application to IU’s Hudson and Holland Scholars Program:

I am a red-headed male, one-fourth Polish who believes he is entitled to minority status and scholarship because the number of red-headed peoples in the world is declining, with ginger populations currently accounting for fewer than 2 percent of total world population.