2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., expanded on an already-radical proposal on Friday, telling reporters that Native Americans should be “part of the conversation” on reparations for African-Americans -- a move that threatens to bring back her own history with Native Americans. Taking questions from reporters ahead of a Democratic Party fundraiser in Manchester, N.H., Warren, she said that America has an “ugly history of racism” and outlined her ways to tackle it -- including the possibility of reparations.

Fox notes that the idea has been proposed before and even the very left-leaning President Obama nixed it once he found out the cost. After all, when one's agenda is to expand government, handing out the national till before you do it pretty well means the expansion is off.

But Warren is forging right ahead with the reparations "conversation" (which suggests she's not serious), obviously appealing to whitebread guilt about historic wrongs, as well as cynically calculating that blacks' and Indians' political loyalty can be bought off with promises of shiny trinkets.

Will Warren herself be entitled for a 1/1024-sized bite of the reparations packages she's dangling out, given her supposed Indian lineage based on that DNA test? Will Mexicans Indians be included in the reparation deal? Unlike her, they do share DNA with American Indians, and sometimes family ties. The reparations promise sounds like good business for the DNA-testing companies.

Which brings up the real issue here. Reparations are a matter of compensating for past wrongs. Pretty much nobody is alive now when the past and supposed atrocities against Indians happened, and yes, there were some atrocities, and there already has been compensation - as well as tax breaks, scholarships and other offerings. Yet the picture is complicated. What about the whites who stopped atrocities against American Indians, do they have to pay reparations, too? What about people who emigrated to the U.S. escaping pogroms and other horrors, should they be required to pay compensation claims for atrocities they had nothing to do with, too? My grandparents spoke of Indian attacks in western Michigan at the turn of the century, so one wonders if they can claim reparations of the reparations, you know, to compensate for the scalpings. They aren't alive now, and neither are the supposed perpetrators, and the matter is now impossible to sort out.

While it's very hard to sort out who did what to whom and who is most entitled dating from the ancient past, there are wrongs that can be addressed, wrongs against Indians that have occurred while we have all been alive, and those wrongs have names on them.

One of them is Elizabeth Warren.

What's she going to do to compensate Indians for that affirmative action slot she took from genuine American Indians in order to get those fancy schmancy ivy league law professor posts? She took those, pretending she was an Indian, and those slots should have been given to Native Americans. That's an authentic wrong that can be verified, given Harvard's touting of her as the staff Indian in its newsletters, Warren's fraudulent proclamation of herself in her own handwriting as an American Indian on her Texas bar card, and Warren's icky bland northeastern white-lady crab salad contribution to an American Indian cuisine cookbook. She's been playing the Indian thing to advance her own career, stepping on the opportunities that were put there for Indians and taking them for herself.

If anyone owes compensation to Indians, it's Warren herself, not the U.S. taxpayers. You first, Liz.

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