Again, the Washington Post has been anything but subtle in its love for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Last week, the D.C.-based newspaper went into crisis management mode to downplay legitimate questions about the senator’s claim that she was fired in the 1970s for being “visibly pregnant.” It has become only more obvious since then.
The Washington Post tweeted this week in promotion of a profile on Warren, “‘You knew, just by talking to her, she was going to be successful.’ She faced sexism, shed a husband and found her voice teaching law in Houston. This is where Liz Warren became Elizabeth Warren.”
Touching. I may weep.
“You knew, just by talking to her, she was going to be successful.”
She faced sexism, shed a husband and found her voice teaching law in Houston.
This is where Liz Warren became Elizabeth Warren. https://t.co/BuL3bOqG20
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 15, 2019
The paper tweeted later, “In 1997, Warren was asked to eulogize longtime UH law professor Eugene Smith. Smith specifically requested that Warren speak at his funeral. But what she said inside a small campus chapel stunned her former colleagues.”
Tantalizing! Spoiler: Warren alleged during her 1997 eulogy that the deceased had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the University of Houston. And a contemporaneous witness backs Warren’s allegation. Interestingly enough, this eulogy anecdote is not even an original scoop for the Washington Post, though it is packaged as one. The Boston Globe and the New Boston Post beat everyone else to the Warren eulogy story all the way back in 2017.
If you think these Washington Post tweets are a bit over-the-top, just wait until you get to Warren’s profile itself. It says that Warren “split with a husband who struggled with her ambition. She started dabbling in the research that would establish her as one of the nation’s foremost experts on consumer bankruptcy law,” it begins. “And she found her voice, developing the speaking style that has made the senator from Massachusetts a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Houston is where Liz Warren became Elizabeth Warren.”
Come on, guys. This is like Beatlemania but without the music.
“If Warren saw herself as a trailblazer for women in law, she has never acknowledged it,” the article continues. It’s never as good when they acknowledge it.
The profile also includes the following passages, quoting directly from one of Warren’s former students:
“It made clear to me that she was an obviously insightful thinker who had read more than the standard books to arrive at her own concepts about how the law works,” Conwell said. “She didn’t accept things at face value. She did her own looking to understand how we got to this system we had. … And that approach, I think, helped her take this really complicated and dreadfully boring stuff and make it really interesting.”
The profile includes this as well from a professor who once sat in on one of Warren’s classes:
Siri, show me “hagiography.”
The Washington Post profile says of Warren’s time as a professor at the University of Houston that she “was younger and less stuffy than the men on the faculty.”
“She painted a wall in her office a bright green and hung a large wicker porch swing,” it claims, “inherited from her grandmother, where she would sit and prepare for classes and talk to anyone who came by.”
It goes on like that for a bit longer before finally, and mercifully, coming to an end.
A word of advice to the Washington Post: Maybe dial it back a notch. Desperation is never an attractive look, especially when you are trying to tell your crush how you feel about her.
Play it cool! She will come around to you eventually, but not if you keep stalking her, harassing her, and leaving these overwrought love notes scattered around in public.
