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When is a politician toast — done-on-both-sides, pass-the-butter-and-jam toast? Well, one hint might be when you show up on blogs and in newspapers photoshopped as the Lone Ranger’s great Indian sidekick Tonto. Another might be when thousands of people spend hours making up sarcastic names for you, such as “Fauxcohontas,” or more brutally, “Dances with Lies.”

This is the unfortunate lot of Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat running for a senate seat in Ted Kennedy’s old district. During the course of the campaign it was revealed that Ms. Warren had listed her minority status in law school faculty directories, and that no less than the Harvard Crimson in 1998 declared in print that: “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.”

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There is no need, thankfully, to go into all the back and forth this has excited. The key points are that Ms. Warren, on the campaign trail and after some initial confusion, vehemently denied “using” her minority heritage to get hired at any university, let alone Harvard. But she still wanted to make very clear her intense pride in her “native heritage.” She knew she was native American, or part native American, because it was “family lore” that her great-great-great grandmother — “like all Indians” — had “high cheek bones.” She laughably claims she only listed herself as “minority” in those law directories in the hopes of grabbing a “lunch” with “others like her.”