Me and Elizabeth Warren

Liz and I don't have much in common, but we've each been caught lying about our proud American Indian ancestry.

In my case the embarrassment was minimal even though it was compounded by claiming another bogus kinship.

When I was wee, the adults in my clan would remark about our descent from Daniel Boone and the strain of Cherokee in our blood. I accepted it as gospel and bragged of it as we played cowboys and Indians on the Des Moines River bluffs.

Years later I learned the myth was understandable, but phony. We had a very weak relationship to Dan'l's wife, Rebecca Bryan, but barring some seriously immoral hankie-pankie in them thar Appalachian  hills, his DNA flowed down a different crick.

And an18th Century liaison contributed a drop of Indian blood -- maybe Cherokee  -- only to a branch that an uncle or cousin or something married into.

I learned to live with shame of mere Irishness (polluted with a contribution here and there of some northern European strains). Anyway, I never planned  to capitalize on my Indianity to help me  capture the U.S. Senate seat belonging  by divine right to the Kennedys of Massachusetts or their acolytes.

Not so for poor Ms. Warren, one of President Obama's favorite Regulators and a member of the Harvard faculty and governing class. It seems that when she applied to be a Harvard teacher the university was anxious to hawk a diverse faculty. Liz went along with the gag. "Me diverse. Heap Injun."

That turned out to be heap fib, and she got caught.  Worse for her, she ducked and dodged like Bill (I never touched that woman) Clinton, and turned a small problem into a big one. It may or may not be enough to help keep the less-objectionable Scott Brown in the Kennedy seat.

We can only hope.