Elizabeth Warren wants Dany to win the Iron Throne because income inequality or 2020 or something

I regret to inform you that 2020 hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is out with a “Game of Thrones” take at the Cut. It is every bit as bad as you’d expect.

“The world needs fewer Cersei Lannisters,” Warren declares. And she would replace them with more Daenerys Targaryens.

So Warren would replace the autonomous female ruler, who overcame a literal patriarchy to become queen by right of effective conquest, with an inbred, deposed princess who considers herself the rightful ruler of a country she’s never lived in by right of agnatic primogeniture. Given the revelation that her lover is actually her nephew and the rightful heir to the House Targaryen, a fallacious interpretation of the line of succession at that.

Honestly, it checks out.

Dany, whom Warren lauds for not “serv[ing] the interests of the rich,” may be less evil than Cersei. After all, it’s difficult not to be worse than a woman who sleeps with one of her brothers and wants to kill the other. But Dany has hardly proven she has either the tact or the merit to take the Iron Throne. Until she acquired Tyrion Lannister — literally called “The Gift” from Jorah Mormont — as her hand, she spent years wandering around Yunkai and Mereen doing almost nothing. She’s alienated Samwell Tarly, perhaps the most affable and intellectually useful character in Westeros, by ordering her dragon to burn Tarly’s father and brother to death for refusing to immediately bend the knee to a “queen” they met five and a half seconds ago, and she has no real plan to take back King’s Landing after her attempt to defeat the White Walkers.

Unsurprisingly, Warren’s argument comes down to income inequality:

Unlike Dany, Cersei doesn’t expect to win with the people — she expects to win in spite of them. When Cersei’s brother (and lover) Jaime begs her not to wage a war — arguing that they don’t have the warrior strength of the Dothraki or the allegiance of the other houses, she replies with all the confidence in the Seven Kingdoms: ‘We have something better. We have the Iron Bank.’ Rather than earn her army, Cersei’s pays for it. She buys 20,000 Golden Company mercenaries — though they arrive without their legendary elephants — with funds from the Iron Bank. But Cersei has no intention of sending her private army north to help defeat the army of the dead — that’s Jon and Dany’s problem. No, Cersei’s army will sit back and wait for whatever comes their way. Cersei’s betting on the strength of the bank to get her through the biggest fight of her life. It never crosses the mind that the bank could fail, or betray her.


Warren’s not wrong that Cersei’s alienated herself from the popular support and allies necessary to successfully govern. And I agree that the world needs fewer blonde women who feel entitled to rule countries because they married the former rulers of said countries and ruthlessly destroy the lives of anyone who stands in their way.

Or, as the consummate Robby Soave puts it:

What’s the difference between Game of Thrones character Cersei Lannister and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton? One is an entitled narcissist who quietly supported her lecherous husband (whom she clearly loathed) when it was politically convenient, then insisted it was her turn to rule (even though it wasn’t), chose boot-lickers, ass-kissers, and elitist bankers as her advisors while alienating more competent and better-liked people who might have helped her, exacted petty vengeance on imagined enemies, escaped justice and the judgment of the people by destroying her main rival—the charismatic, income-inequality obsessed populist—with an explosive cheat, and was left confused why so many people in her country would rather be ruled by a complete political unknown who tells it like it is.

The other fucks her twin brother.


But the world doesn’t need to replace one batch of entitled, inept blondes with another. At this point, Sansa and Tyrion, who may technically still be married, have proven the most adept at the “Game of Thrones,” and Maggy the Frog’s prophecy that a “younger, more beautiful” queen will unseat her applies just as well to Sansa, who’s survived two forced marriages, countless rapes, Joffrey, and Littlefinger only to hold the North together and safeguard food for the Long Winter, just as well as it does to Dany.

But if the slightly less evil, entitled career politician can replace the more evil one, that may bode well for a certain senator seeking to win a presidential primary once won by another.

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