Even many Republicans walked away from the second 2016 debate, on Sept. 16, with the same question: "Is this really the best the Republican Party has to offer?"
Frankly, it was hard to imagine any one of the Republican candidates on stage taking possession of the Oval Office – not the blowhard Donald Trump, nor the inept Bobby Jindal, not even the dormant Jeb Bush. Not one of them appeared presidential. But, by far, the worst of the worst, yet the one the media seemed to fall in love with, was the failed CEO Carly Fiorina.
The only job she's qualified for is prevaricator in chief, not commander in chief. Indeed, her whole campaign is a lie, starting with the notion – blindly spread by the media – that she, like carnival barker Trump and brain surgeon Ben Carson, is some kind of political outsider.
That's simply not the case. Fiorina's no newcomer to politics. In 2008, she was a frequent face on national television as economic adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. She served as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee's "Victory '08 Committee." She later lobbied to be the party's vice presidential nominee, but lost out to Sarah Palin. And in 2010 she ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate against California's Barbara Boxer. Fiorina's an outsider only in the sense that the voters of California rejected her big time – by 10 points.
Fiorina's entire campaign is based on an even bigger lie, again usually repeated unqualifiedly by the media: that she's the former, tough but effective, CEO of Hewlett-Packard. But the truth is – she drove that company into the ground before she was fired. In fact, her dismal record at HP, including the layoffs of 30,000 employees, was one of the main issues in her losing the Senate race, where Democrats labeled her Carly "Failorina."
"The clearest measure of her performance – and the report card preferred by Wall Street," writes Wall Street executive Steven Rattner in the New York Times, "is H.P.'s stock price, which dropped by 52 percent during her tenure of almost six years." For which, Rattner reports, she received more than $100 million in compensation.
In response, Fiorina argues that these were tough times for all technology companies. Yes, but IBM's shares declined by 27.5 percent and Dell's by only 3 percent. She also points out that many business leaders, including Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney and Michael Bloomberg, were fired at some point in their career. But, as Rattner notes, all four of them went on to become a huge business success. Fiorina has not held a full-time, private-sector job since being fired from H.P. in 2005.
No wonder nobody wants to hire her. She performed so badly that in 2009 Portfolio magazine rated her as the 19th worst CEO of all time and described her as a "consummate self-promoter" who was "busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered." Sound familiar?
But Fiorina's biggest whopper came in the last debate, where she, the one woman on stage, angrily took on the role of chief attack dog against Planned Parenthood. Who among us didn't cringe as she declared: "I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'"
There's only one problem: That tape doesn't exist. If it did exist, we'd have seen it over and over on cable television. It's like Michelle Obama's famous "whitey" tape from 2008. That tape doesn't exist. Yet Carly Fiorina refuses to admit she made it all up. FactCheck.org looked into it and concluded: "We are aware of no video showing such a scene." Which may come as no surprise because, as Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall puts it: "Fiorina has a habit of simply making things up."
Even conservatives are starting to question Fiorina's disregard for the facts. WND.com reports that while Fiorina has repeatedly criticized the Clinton Global Initiative for accepting donations from foreign countries, she has never disclosed her own cozy relationship with the foundation. According to WND's Aaron Klein, Fiorina not only spoke at two CGI events, she currently serves on the board of two nonprofits that have partnered with CGI.
It's universal. On the left and on the right, people have learned this about Carly Fiorina: You can't believe a word she says. And that's the truth.
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