CUSTER THOUGHT HE WAS WINNING TOO.

I see we've had a nice fat crop of white people telling the codetalkers and their families that calling Elizabeth Warren "Pocahantas" at a ceremony meant to celebrate Native-American achievements isn't racist -- why, it's every bit as legit as if they called that "halfrican" Obama "Rastus" or "Shoeshine Boy." (It'd be his own fault for calling himself "black," the big Kenyan liar!)

Let's look at the version of this shtick offered by Mollie Hemingway -- one of the few writers at The Federalist who knows what she's doing (i.e., soulless propaganda):

Democrats and their media footsoldiers decided it’s racist to mock someone for falsely claiming to be Native American. For example, Jim Acosta of CNN wrote: “WH press sec says ‘Pocahontas’ is not a racial slur. (Fact check: it is.)” 

Uh, fact check: no.

Well, that's all the defense her readers will need. But just in case--

For one thing, as Gabriel Malor said...

Ha ha, that's good. I guess if you're going to defend Trump's slur by pretending it's not a slur, citing a gay gay who defends RFRAs makes thematic sense at least.

But hold the phone, Hemingway's got a hat trick: The column is called "Calling Pence A Liar While Protecting Warren Is Why People Hate Media," and the big gotcha is that stoopid libs defend Warren for repeating what her family told her about her Indian heritage, but the Washington Post calls it a lie when Mike Pence truthfully says, "There are more Americans working today than ever before in American history." As Hemingway tells it:

In fact, it is factually correct to say that more Americans are working now than ever before. The Washington Post admits this, showcases the numbers (124 million, up from 65 million in 1968), and says Pence is “technically correct.” So they give him, quite amazingly, three Pinocchios, their little metric that summarizes their analysis of the truthfulness of the statement. Then they admit they wanted to give him four Pinocchios but were constrained by the fact that what he said was true. I'm not joking.

But Pence complimenting his own administration for having more Americans working than ever before is pretty much giving Trump credit for America having more Americans than ever before. From the Post fact-checker, Nicole Lewis:

In 2016 the labor force participation rate for Americans ages 25 to 54 hovered around 81 percent, but it peaked in 1997 at 84 percent. The rate is often used by economists as an indicator of the health of the job market. The higher the number, the healthier the market... 

Of course there are more Americans working. That’s because there are more Americans today than ever before.

We were tempted to say that Pence earns Four Pinocchios, but the numbers are technically correct. Yet they are so devoid of meaning that Pence and the people who applauded his statement should be ashamed.

People who can read, write, and cipher understand that "technically correct" is the right term here, as it is correct in the sense that it would be correct to say when Bill Gates walks into a bar, the mean salary of the patrons exceeds a million -- accurate but meaningless.

Hemingway's traditional treacly mix of moral dudgeon and three-card-monte logic is always annoying, but what makes this even worse is, she's arguing that Warren's claim of Indian heritage -- which, like the claims of a lot of Americans to such heritage, is supported only anecdotally -- is so big a lie that it can be compared unfavorably to the behavior of Donald Trump,  the most notorious and extensively-documented liar in American history.

This is the sort of thing you can only get away with when your readership's minds are so poisoned by years of dumb how-me-big-chief gags about Warren that it's all they've ever cared to know about her; that one impression has become so significant to them, and they're so convinced it's damning, that they hardly notice she beat their heart-throb Scott Brown to win back a Senate seat for the Democrats and is significantly more popular than Trump.

Both Trump and Hemingway notice, though, which is why they bang that one tom-tom (forgive me) over and over. It's also why Hemingway throws in the "Why People Hate Media" bit -- like the Warren woo-woo, it's so detached from objective reality (have you seen Republicans' favorability numbers lately?) it's practically meta.

Sadly, Trump and Hemingway are also able to put this over on some mainstream media dummies, too ("Elizabeth Warren's Pocahontas Pickle" -- oh, fuck you). The good news is that maybe all the pissy media guys who like to beat up on female Democrats will be fired for sexual misconduct by the next election.