Elizabeth Warren. I’ve been smitten with her since some point in 2009, when I heard her give a radio interview about the importance of creating a Financial Product Safety Commission. I have to confess, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about any Financial Product Safety Commission, but I was immensely impressed with her passion for protecting the financial interests of ordinary people. There’s something powerfully attractive about the intellectual ferocity of her advocacy.
Since then, I’ve sort of followed her career. I was disappointed when President Obama failed to appoint her to head the Financial Product Safety Commission, but I was delighted when she decided to run for Senate (oh, to live in Massachusetts).
A couple days ago, she was speaking to voters at a VFW hall in Brockton. A man in the audience—apparently a supporter of the Tea Party movement—interrupted her with a question about the Occupy Wall Street folks. Warren gave a brief answer, saying in effect she supported the protests against Wall Street. At that point the man said, “If you’re the intellectual creator of that so-called party, you’re a socialist whore.”
There are so many things sad and pathetic and profoundly wrong taking place in this scene. An unemployed person is standing up for the institutions that have damaged him financially. He’s insulting a person who has spent much of her adult life advocating for people just like him. He’s not actually disagreeing with her; he’s not addressing her position at all. He’s just casting sexualized insults at her. He’s not saying “I think you’re mistaken,” or “Your reasoning is flawed” or even “You don’t understand the situation.” He’s calling her a whore.
You have to feel sort of sorry for the guy. He’s been warped by political and economic forces he doesn’t understand. But mostly you have to admire Elizabeth Warren, who had the decency to give the man a chance to speak his mind, then after being insulted, turned with unflappable practicality to the audience and said “We have work to do.”
There’s a 17th century Irish love poem that goes like this:
Of all the Girls that are so smart
There’s none like pretty SALLY,
She is the Darling of my Heart,
And she lives in our Alley.
Elizabeth Warren is the socialist whore of my heart. And she’s trying to get us out of the alley.
gregfallis.com 
Well said.
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At this point, we can’t tell if people like him are plants by the Koch brothers’ billion-dollar “grassroots” campaign, attempting to incite negativity towards candidates (as was done during the debacle known as health care reform) or if he is completely ignorant about the world around him.
To me, the saddest part of our so-called political debate is that people are so uninformed about issues that they are easily swayed by the deliberately harmful misinformation repeated ad nauseum by politicians who don’t have their constituents’ best interest in mind (much less at heart) and that bastion of right-wing demagoguery, FOX News. That people make asses of themselves, as this man did, by railing against a person who might very well be the most ardent consumer advocate, goes to show just how powerful the marriage of corporate money and FOX’s propaganda-making machinery can be.
It also hasn’t helped that the political arena has become even more of a circus tent with the exemplary[sic] behaviour of South Carolina’s Joe Wilson and his ilk.
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Thanks for this, Greg. Well said.
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