On the eve of January's Democratic presidential debate, CNN published a potential bombshell of a story. Bernie Sanders, unnamed sources alleged, warned Elizabeth Warren in December 2018 that a woman couldn't win the presidency. If true, the story would destroy the Vermont senator's cultural cache among the identity politics Left. But if Warren equivocated enough with a modicum of hesitation with her recognition of the story during the debate, it would prove fatal to her candidacy.

Not only did Warren pussyfoot around the allegation, but she also tried to weaponize it to maximize identity politics. When asked point-blank about the charge Sanders had vehemently denied, Warren didn't say that Sanders was lying. Instead, she said that she "disagreed" with his alleged assertion at the time, and then waxed poetic for a minute about women's electoral viability in 2018.

Warren had two jobs tonight: first, to convince the country that her camp didn't leak the sexism story, and then to convince them that it wasn't to play the gender card. Not only did she do both, but she managed to compound it with a cringe-inducing line about Sanders's age and lambasting all of the men on the stage for collectively having "lost 10 elections."

Perhaps if Warren weren't a serial liar, embellishing everything from her Native American appropriation to a wrongful termination lie, her gig would have seemed less suspect. But, as Sanders noted, he deferred to Warren in 2015, giving her the first go at the Democratic nomination. Warren had to use her diminished credibility to impugn the intentions of a fairly tried and tested feminist, and, instead, she exposed her motives within minutes. She all but ignored the actual allegation against Sanders to weaponize it in the name of feminism.

It's shameful for identity politics, sure, but it's also the death knell of a presidential bid that debased itself in its demise.