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Warren drops out of the race — 47 Comments

1. “A couple of years ago Warren seemed like a rising force in the Democratic Party, but she was limited by her own grating personality.”

   If she had run in 2016, it wouldn’t have mattered. She could have been the populist candidate the Democrats needed to beat Trump. But she blanched at taking on the Clinton Machine.

   Of course, considering what we now know about Warren, her character, and her instincts, America probably dodged a bullet.

   Mike

2. I’m sure she “has a plan” for her own losing.
   Fully deserved.
   Good riddance! to bad … Fauxcohantas!

   (The Disney movie, Pocahantas, had excellent Slovak dubbing. Many of our kids, and my wife, liked the Slovak songs better than the English originals.)

3. I must have watched that movie 4 or 5 times – or parts of it – in order to finally get straight who killed who.

   I also have the disk with the version including deleted scenes where Marlowe enters various rooms in the bungalow, including the kitchen, and has a discussion with the district attorney.

   Apparently the producers of the movie were less concerned with it making sense than it being a showcase for Lauren Bacall. What that sassy nothingburger of a woman has that appealed to some men, including studio heads apparently, is a complete mystery to me. Bogart apparently liked her enough to marry her.

4. I wonder how many women found her clothes just too weird. She sure doesn’t feel like me, and I’m a pretty conservative dresser. Couldn’t she fit a few scarves and necklaces into her suitcase?

5. Re Warren.

   There are apparently a large number of people who while disliking Elizabeth Warren’s politics, find her admirable in numerous other ways.

   I cannot say that I find any character, personality, or moral trait of hers as anything but insufferable, and actually revolting.

6. In Soviet Russia, CAMPAIGN DROPS YOU!

7. Many years ago, Gen. Grace Hopper was asked where we’d gone astray as a country. Her answer was that our problems began in ‘the business schools’. They promoted ‘management’ instead of ‘leadership’.

   A critic of Warren I’ve read recently offered that women in charge can be sorted into three taxa: the battleax, the token, and the hall monitor. The battleax is appropriate for positions of leadership, but seldom seen in today’s world. The token placates each contending constituency by giving it what it wants (to the detriment of the organization), feels bad the whole time, and heads back to her previous employments at the earliest opportunity. The hall monitor is the enforcer of niggling rules, a common elementary school type. Warren was an elementary schoolteacher. She doesn’t belong in a position that takes a leader. (Hillary might be classified as a battleax. Alas, she a completely unscrupulous megalomaniac).

   Women in public life in my time who I could imagine in positions of leadership include Jeane Kirkpatrick and Sarah Palin. One had little or no political ambition and the other closed the books on political office at age 47.

8. When Warren’s star was rising, she was tapped by Obama to “stand up” (his words) the then new CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). The CFPB’s constitutionality is currently being considered in court as it is structured to give neither the president nor the congress much control over it.

   The machine will make Warren pay if she does not endorse Biden.
   ____

   The Big Sleep is one of my top 5 favorite film noirs and that scene is wonderful. Others rate The Maltese Falcon as high or higher, but I disagree. The Big Sleep has a confusing or even a mess of a plot, but the film is all about style and the characters.

   I had never looked up that actress before. Dorothy Malone. I had seen her in other later films, but she had switched from brunette to blonde at some early point, and I didn’t recognize her. She won a best supporting actor Oscar for a bad girl role in the 50’s.

9. Wow, I had forgotten that scene from The Big Sleep. “…I’d rather get wet in here…” Goodness gracious, I’m surprised that got by.

   There’s a story that the writers had trouble figuring out some aspect of the plot, and asked Chandler about, and he didn’t know either.

10. I wonder how many women found her clothes just too weird.

    The woman in public life who knows how to present herself in that way is Tonette Walker. Jennifer Psaki, Marie Harf, and S.E. Cupp are not as reliable, but they often hit the spot as well.

11. There’s a story that the writers had trouble figuring out some aspect of the plot, and asked Chandler about, and he didn’t know either.

    Steve Miller doesn’t know who the Pompitous of Love is, either. You have and then lose little flashes of insight.

12. There are apparently a large number of people who while disliking Elizabeth Warren’s politics, find her admirable in numerous other ways.

    If she’d stayed in her lane all these years, she might be someone of unblemished accomplishment. Instead, she’s Princess Spreading Bull.

13. Mac,
    If she had delivered that line, it might have gotten cut. But the primary meaning of it is a reference to the bottle of booze in his pocket, I think. There were wet and dry counties following prohibition. There are double entendres throughout.

    Lauren Bacall was a big hit in To Have and Have Not, and the filmmakers tried hard, probably too hard, to replicate that in The Big Sleep. But they had already signed over a big paycheck to Bacall early on. I love the scene where Bogart first meets the Carmen character played by Martha Vickers.

    From IMDB:

    Raymond Chandler claimed that Martha Vickers gave such an intense performance as Carmen Sternwood that she completely overshadowed Lauren Bacall, and that much of Vickers’ performance ended up on the cutting room floor as a result.

14. Mac,
    The story i heard was that they asked Chandler who killed Owen(the Sternwoods chauffeur).
    He didn’t know.

15. As misogynistic as it sounds, Warren suffers from the same thing Hillary did: she reminds everyone of their or their spouse’s ex-wife.

16. I shall blow my own trumpet here for the sweet and touching Warren memorial at

    http://americandigest.org/its-back-the-prog-reservation-for-fauxcahontas/

17. It’s not just women. Bloomberg showed all the personality of a potato, and is reputed to be unpleasant to women who work for him. Biden likes to put his hands on women and girls in situations where they can’t easily just slap him. Bernie just shouts, and shouts, and shouts.

18. Thank God that shrew is headed back to the reservation.

    Unless… Biden wins the nomination and selects Warren as his VP in an attempt to placate Sanders’ “Bros”.

    Shudder…

19. Bloomberg showed all the personality of a potato, and is reputed to be unpleasant to women who work for him.

    The potato built a handsome business from the ground up and performed creditably as Mayor of New York (a performance he has now repudiated). How’s your life going?

20. I checked the Oklahoma results. If Warren had dropped out the day before the primary like Mayor Pete and Amy, she would not have helped Sanders beat Biden because of the mail in and early voting numbers.

    Even Pete and Amy had most of their votes on Tuesday (59%). In primaries, the die-hards will still vote for their candidate.

    BTW, Warren came in 4th in her “home” state of Oklahoma. I guess the tribes didn’t vote for her.

21. “The potato built a handsome business from the ground up and performed creditably as Mayor of New York (a performance he has now repudiated). How’s your life going?”

    When you feel compelled to stick up for a thin-skinned oligarch with authoritarian tendencies…you might want to stop and ponder your motivation.

    Mike

22. “Unless… Biden wins the nomination and selects Warren as his VP in an attempt to placate Sanders’ “Bros”.”

    I’d say that’s a likely outcome. He’s not going to choose Kamala, & all the meme-ing aside, he’s not going to choose governor-in-exile Stacy Abrams. But Warren is a hard possibility.

    “Shudder” is right.

23. Bloomberg’s personality as presented in those debates has nothing whatever to do with his business success. He’s not a showman, and he was unable to buy the nomination because he couldn’t sell himself personally.

    MBunge, I think the commenter in question just likes to argue with people, sometimes with good reasons and sometimes with reasons not obvious to anyone else.

24. I concur, the ability to build a business from the ground up and perform creditably as Mayor is irrelevant to being a poor excuse for a human being.

    Bloomberg’s ‘personality’ perfectly reflects his moral failings.

25. John G,

    Woman or minority and/or radical. Biden will choose his VP from whatever victim group best serves his chances of winning. The more boxes checked on that scorecard, the more seriously they will be considered. Loyalty to the party establishment will be essential, which actually weighs against Warren as VP given her animosity to Wall Street. If Biden makes it to the election and wins, there’s a fair chance his VP may be President within the first year. Biden is deteriorating before our very eyes.

26. You say “po-tay-toe” and I say “po-taht-toe” —
    People who do something good, or even great, can still be socially unadept.
    Being very rich and very powerful means never having to say you’re sorry.

    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_latest_viral_videos_of_mike_bloomberg_highlight_his_disconnect_from_humanity.html

27. Geoffrey Britain on March 5, 2020 at 6:17 pm said:
    … Loyalty to the party establishment will be essential, which actually weighs against Warren as VP given her animosity to Wall Street. If Biden makes it to the election and wins, there’s a fair chance his VP may be President within the first year. Biden is deteriorating before our very eyes.
    * * *
    I think the Democrat establishment will consider Biden’s VP to be president-elect in all but name.
    The donors didn’t like Warren before; they won’t like her any better now; and she doesn’t have any significant money, power, or coat-tails.
    (She’s rich, but she ain’t THAT rich.)

    Also, she lies almost as much as Biden does, and they don’t need two of the same kind on the ticket.
    Although that could make finding a candidate rather tricky.

28. And Then There Were None
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None

    All successive American reprints and adaptations use that title, except for the Pocket Books paperbacks published between 1964 and 1986, which appeared under the title Ten Little Indians.

    Ten little Indian boys went out to dine;
    One choked his little self and then there were nine.
    Nine little Indian boys sat up very late;
    One overslept himself and then there were eight.
    Eight little Indian boys traveling in Devon;
    One said he’d stay there and then there were seven.
    Seven little Indian boys chopping up sticks;
    One chopped himself in halves and then there were six.
    Six little Indian boys playing with a hive;
    A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.
    Five little Indian boys going in for law;
    One got in Chancery and then there were four.
    Four little Indian boys going out to sea;
    A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.
    Three little Indian boys walking in the zoo;
    A big bear hugged one and then there were two.
    Two Little Indian boys sitting in the sun;
    One got frizzled up and then there was one.
    One little Indian boy left all alone;
    He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.

29. Tommy Jay, actually I think the *primary* and ostensible reference is to the rain. But the secondary innuendo…wow.

    Fred the Fourth, yes, that’s what Wikipedia says.

30. When you feel compelled to stick up for a thin-skinned oligarch with authoritarian tendencies…you might want to stop and ponder your motivation.

    My motivation was to suggest she consider better assessment criteria. This isn’t that difficult.

31. Bloomberg’s personality as presented in those debates has nothing whatever to do with his business success.

    You haven’t a clue what did or did not generate his accomplishments. Neither does any of us. Ask an astute person who has worked with him.

32. Artfldgr on March 5, 2020 at 7:06 pm said:
    And Then There Were None
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None

    All successive American reprints and adaptations use that title, except for the Pocket Books paperbacks published between 1964 and 1986, which appeared under the title Ten Little Indians.
    * * *
    The original title was even less politically correct.
    Think about how the reception of “Little Black Sambo” has changed over the years (never mind that it’s a delightful, positive tale of a clever child), mostly due to unauthorized copies and illustrations.
    Brits and Americans, at least in that period, are not referring to either the same complexion or ethnicity by the terms “black” and “Indian” as adjectives for persons.

    Trivia: the stage adaptation made by Christie (as she did for several of her novels) changed the ending and was very popular, as was the film version.

    Warren should have stuck with her own roots instead of trying to feather her nest by grafting herself onto someone else’s. That she was exposed as a liar (and cultural appropriator!) and then STILL was a major Democrat candidate pretty much tells you what their standards really are, as opposed to the ones they pull out to scalp Republicans with.

33. “You haven’t a clue what did or did not generate his accomplishments.” Art Deco

    Had you a higher EQ you’d have a clue; the ability to spot an opportunity to fill a need, coupled with ruthless ambition in pursuit of maximizing the return on fulfilling that need.

34. “If Biden makes it to the election and wins, there’s a fair chance his VP may be President within the first year. Biden is deteriorating before our very eyes.”

    Yep…I can’t see how he makes it through a campaign season upright.
    There’s a long way to go still.

    I noted elsewhere that to name their VP running mates now, both he & Bernie, could use that person as the difference maker…just spitballin’…I’m no political campaign guru especially now that there’s speculation Pence will get deep-sixed just ahead of the R Convention in favour of Nikki Haley. Imagine…pundits trying to outthink POTUS!

    But…your wisdom holds…woman or POC or both…far left. Whoever ticks the most boxes best.

35. TJ writes:

    “Lauren Bacall was a big hit in To Have and Have Not, and the filmmakers tried hard, probably too hard, to replicate that in The Big Sleep. But they had already signed over a big paycheck to Bacall early on. I love the scene where Bogart first meets the Carmen character played by Martha Vickers.

    From IMDB:

    ‘Raymond Chandler claimed that Martha Vickers gave such an intense performance as Carmen Sternwood that she completely overshadowed Lauren Bacall, and that much of Vickers’ performance ended up on the cutting room floor as a result.’ “

    She’s way better looking too. I mean, it’s not even a contest.

36. She’s way better looking too. I mean, it’s not even a contest.

    https://www.warbyparker.com/eyeglasses/men

    I think they’ll sell you frames which will hold the 20-200 coke bottle lenses.

37. Mac,
    It is your quote. “…I’d rather get wet in here…” Well, it isn’t raining in here. There is booze though and maybe sex.

38. Social media elections are not the same as reality.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1235203416554704897.html

    The big lesson coming out of the 2020 Dem primary is that social media does not provide an accurate picture of the electorate. It’s a hall of mirrors that has a tendency to exaggerate support for fringe candidates and magnify weak attacks into sick burns.
    …
    This is one reason Bernie Sanders looked all but unstoppable to the media, even though a lot of legacy media orgs didn’t like him. It’s most noticeable in the media fascination with Warren, who is practically an asterisk out in the real world but looked huge on social media.

    Social media isn’t always wrong about candidates, and it’s probably true that successful campaigns are now difficult to pull off without a decent online presence, but it’s too easy to forget that real-world still matters more. Social media magnifies and distorts passion.
    …
    The thing you have to remember about social media, its defining attribute, is that it’s EASY. Instant input, instant output, zero cost, zero effort. Anything that requires even the tiniest bit of effort, with even the smallest dollop of consequences, will go very differently.

    Which demonstrates something a lot of people in politics don’t want to admit: the difficulty of voting, even when it’s made very easy, influences the outcome. We would live in a very different world if we had one-click online voting, no matter how secure it was. /end

39. The Left has learned nothing about voters or candidates from 2016 and today.
    The final paragraphs pretty much tell you what the rest of the article says.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/america-punished-elizabeth-warren-her-competence/607531/

    …Malone spoke with two women at a Buttigieg event in New Hampshire. One liked Joe Biden, but felt he was a bit too old for the presidency. The other liked Buttigieg, without qualification: “I feel he’s well positioned,” she explained. “The country is ready for a more gentle approach.”

    As for Elizabeth Warren? “When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.”
    …
    One of the truisms of the 2020 campaign—just as it was a truism in 2016, and in 2008—is that women candidates are punished, still, for public displays of ambition. (One resonant fact of Hillary Clinton’s political life is that she was much more popular, in opinion polls, during her tenure as secretary of state—a role for which she did not campaign, and in which she served as at the pleasure of the president—than she was when, just a few years after that, she sought the presidency herself.) American culture has maintained a generally awkward relationship with political self-promotion: That George Washington was conscripted into the presidency rather than campaigning for it remains a foundational bit of lore. When women are the ones doing the promoting, the tension gets ratcheted up.

    Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,” Manne argues. It rewards those who uphold the existing order of things; it punishes those who fight against it. It is perhaps the mechanism at play when a woman puts herself forward as a presidential candidate and finds her attributes—her intelligence, her experience, her compassion—understood as threats. It is perhaps that mechanism at play when a woman says, “I believe in us,” and is accused of being “self-righteous.”

    Maybe they were being punished for being serial liars, financial grifters, and generally unpleasant human beings.

    Note that the lead-off sentence quotes a female, not a male, voter.

    And, wasn’t the biggest complaint about Ted Cruz “but he’s just not warm and fuzzy” — hard to blame that on the patriarchy.

40. Warren’s media bubble in pictures.

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/03/elizabeth-warrens-embarrassing-massachusetts-loss-exposes-her-fawning-media-fans/

    Elizabeth Warren’s embarrassing loss in Massachusetts is a great reminder that the political/media/Twitter bubble isn’t real. Let’s look back on some of the slobbering magazine covers.

41. Probably correct, and a new name for Fauxcahontas aka Liawatha.

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/03/05/stands-with-tin-cup-takes-a-knee/

    ‘Stands With Tin Cup’ Takes a Knee…
    Posted on March 5, 2020 by sundance
    As expected most media outlets are now reporting Elizabeth Warren is ending her ill-fated bid for the presidency and is gonna git her a beer.
    …
    It will be interesting to watch if Warren endorses Sanders on the trail of tears, or if she takes her tin cup to Joe Biden.

    A most likely scenario for Liawatha is a non-endorsement of Sanders without an overt endorsement of Biden and the Big Club; simply because a non-endorsement of Sanders is a covert endorsement of Biden and her limo-liberal alliance.

    As usual, having your cake and eating it too.

42. Warren may be thinking “ I’m only going to suspend my campaign, not quit, because I am facing two older guys, both of whom could easily have their campaigns terminated for medical reasons. One guy had a heart attack and is 78. The other guy has iffy early dementia and is 77.” “I”ll be the last gal standing and it”ll be perfect for me to step in.”

43. re the “pompatus of love”, I was listening to the Theme Time Radio Hour during my commute the other night and Dylan introduced a 1954 song by the Medallions, entitled ‘The Letter’, by extolling singer/songwriter Vernon Green’s use of the invented words ‘pizmotality’ and ‘puppetudes’. The song contains the lyric “Oh my darling, let me whisper/sweet words of pizmotality/and discuss the puppetutes of love”. That’s where Steve Miller got it for “Enter Maurice… my dearest darling, let me whisper sweet words of epistimology in your ear, and speak to you of the pompatus of love…

44. Dnaxy on March 6, 2020 at 1:17 am said:
    Warren may be thinking … “I”ll be the last gal standing and it”ll be perfect for me to step in.”
    * * *
    IIRC, Bloomberg also has only “suspended” his campaign. The other drop-outs didn’t even have this remote chance as an excuse for staying in.
    However, if Hill decides she’s going to allow herself to be drafted to save the Party (she will tank the country, but I don’t think she even cares), then Liz doesn’t have much of a chance.
    The Democrats are now officially the Party of Stupid

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/03/hilarious-hillary-2.php

    https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/JW-v-State-Hillary-Deposition-Order-01242.pdf

45. Re: The Big Sleep

    My then-wife and I watched it for the first time for each of us about ten years ago and both of us thought the bookstore scene was the best part of the whole movie.

    I read the book last year, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense either. Without going to look for it on my shelves, I seem to recall the foreword talking about how it was a “stitch-up” of several different short stories (not an unusual practice at the time) and that even Chandler thought it was mostly about mood and setting rather than the plot (which is full of holes, the killer of the chauffeur being just one of them).

46. Short answer: no.
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/03/did-warrens-campaign-fail-because-of-her-gender.php

47. How?

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