Originally Posted by
Oneuli
The percentage was given as a range. Right wingers, being deeply dishonest people, have cited only the very low end of the range. The higher end is 1/64, which, as you know, is vastly more than 1/100th of a percentile.
Does that prove she has Cherokee blood? No. DNA tests aren't perfected to the point of identifying a particular tribal origin. What it shows is that she was almost certainly telling the truth about having been told a family history of such origins. Of course, we already knew she was almost certainly telling the truth about that, since reporters have checked with other relatives of hers (many of whom are Republicans), who confirmed they heard the same stories. So, she honestly passed along family history, and the Republicans dutifully pretended to think she was lying -- and then wound up with egg on their faces when their endless demands for DNA tests ended up showing that she did, in fact, have Native American ancestry. Oops!
As for the "Stolen Valor" argument, it's pretty weak. Even if it hadn't turned out that Warren was telling the truth, it would simply have been a deception about ancestry -- something that is an unearned accident of birth, anyway. It's similar to the way Trump repeatedly lies and says his father was born in Germany, which he wasn't. Is that "worse than stolen valor"? No. There's a reason that you probably haven't even heard about those repeated lies: a politician lying about family details predating his or her birth just isn't seen as important, even when done for personal advantage (the way Trump has used his father's fictitious German birth to assert a kinship with the EU when that's politically convenient). In the long list of vile Trump lies, his lies about where his father was born hardly even merit a mention. The same is true for the "stolen honor" of Trump repeatedly lying about graduating at the top of his class in college. It's slimy, but it's relatively trivial, so it's seldom brought up. But, as you know, Warren doesn't supply the same broad list of serious personal misconduct to attack as Trump does, and so the right-wingers must take what they can get, and that included trying to turn her ancestry claims into a major scandal, back when they thought she was lying. And they're at such a loss for what else to attack her about, that they're not letting go of that one even now that they know she was telling the truth.
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