What is it with Elizabeth Warren and her propensity to lie about her past?

She's been caught in another one, this time a fakeroo so bad her brother called her out on it.

According to Mediaite:

Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren apparently angered her brother by claiming their father worked as a “janitor,” with a family friend saying that the characterization made David Herring “furious.”

Because 'janitor' sounds so much more poor and bottom-of-the-economic ladder than 'maintenance man,' doesn't it? Lots of kids like to brag that their dad has a job that is more important than it really is, but it takes a charlatan like Warren to grubby up her family members for the purposes of advancing her own political prospects.

Here's some of the passage from the Boston Globe report that Mediaite spotted:

According to a family friend, David has disagreed with the way Warren calls herself the daughter of a janitor as she describes the work he found after losing a job as a salesman after his heart attack. “When she called her dad a janitor during the early stages of this, David was furious,” said Pamela Winblood, 78, a longtime friend of David who had fallen out with him and supports Warren’s presidential bid. “He said, ‘My Dad was never a janitor.’ I said, ‘Well, he was a maintenance man.’ ” (In an interview, Warren said she had no idea why that characterization would bother her brother; she has referred to their father as a “maintenance man” in her 2014 autobiography but often as a “janitor” on the campaign trail.)”

The family had always considered themselves middle class, but now they're being remodeled into something far more proletarian and downtrodden. What, after all, could be humbler an occupation than 'janitor,' a job that these days is often taken by unskilled illegal aliens? Yes, all work has dignity and a good janitor is worth his price in gold. But a maintenance man at an apartment building probably does quite a bit more, and holds a high position of trust - he's someone who might fix electrical, air-conditioning, roof and plumbing issues, keep the building up to code for the inspectors, ensure security, help locked-out people get into their apartments, and maybe keep the bums away. There likely are some differences, and to Warren's brother, they were important.

Warren not only gets to recast herself as a reborn prole with this lie at her dad's expense, she also manages to draw attention away from her own personal status as a very rich, very thin candidate with lots of plastic surgery from all that money she made from near no-show jobs at Harvard and a house-flipping past. Playing bottom-of-the-barrel has its uses, n'est-ce pas? No wonder the brother didn't like it. "Hey, aren't you the downtrodden peasants that big fancy Elizabeth Warren emerged from against all odds?" Aren't you (pax Tom Wolfe) part of the primordial ooze? You know there are people who are going to ask. What a thing to put your family through.

It's part of a chain of fabrications so typical of Elizabeth Warren. As if the fake Indian scandal, the fake pregnant-teacher-firing scandal, the fake collegea-admissions scandals didn't teach her to be very very cautious about what she claims about herself...She just keeps on going and assumes no one will notice the inauthencity pattern.

So now we have her, according to her own account: She's a down-poor American Indian daughter of a janitor, who couldn't afford college admissions fees, let alone college but for a random scholarship. She always wanted to be a teacher, and somehow chose special ed kids over the bright stars, and was then thwarted from that tough teaching slot by a wicked principal who forced her to quit because she got pregnant. After that, she just happened into law school and then ivy league teaching slots because she was supposedly so brilliant, rather than because she was an American Indian and Harvard had a slot to fill. After that, she went on to conduct phony research advancing the leftist agenda that hospital care bills were were reponnsible for most bankruptcies, which wasn't true either, but certainly advanced the 'narrative.'

Her real story of course is that she was middle class, she was raised by homeowners, she was conservative in her youth same as Hillary Clinton, she is a person whose family still has at least two conservatives, and effectively someone writer Kurt Schlichter might call a 'normal,' except that she did a lot of acrobatics to break her way into the very rigged ivy league, changing her ancestry, changing her ideology, etc.

Does the fakeness ever stop with her? At this point, I'm just waiting for the next whopper.

It's probably significant that as Warren's lies pile up, her polls numbers are beginning to crater. She's in third place in Iowa, down from first. And she's been going down for several weeks. The public likes authenticity in candidates, and she's got a pattern now of inauthenticity.

This janitor incident reminds me of the kinds of lies that brought down Kamala Harris. Harris claimed she was raised in a racist hellhole, which in fact was ultra-progressive Berkeley, California. She claimed to have been poor, and speaks in a downtrodden black cadence as if to convince voters she's down there with them in the slums. Fact is, she was raised in a very well educated home with two parents professors at prestigious universities in demanding disciplines. She claimed that she let crooks out of jail as prosecutor, in line with the current fashion, when in fact the record showed she put them away like a sheriff and was so hardcore she refused to exonerate even innocent people convicted on false prosecutorial lies, nor did she let people out when their sentences were up. (Rep. Tulsi Gabbard slayed the Kamala dragon on that one.) She claimed to have smoked pot and listened to Snoop Dogg because 'I'm Jamaican,' which was fake as heck, getting herself called out by her own Jamaican-born dad for that nasty stereotype, something that is very much the opposite in respectable Jamaican society and he knew she knew it.

Warren is the same thing, now getting called out for prole-ing up the family as a bunch of underachievers. She's keeping it up, and for that it's hard to think she won't go the way of Harris for it. Inauthencity, no matter what your party, is a deal breaker for voters.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Image credit: Caricature by DonkeyHotey, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0