Friday, September 25, 2015

The Incredibly Shrinking Honesty of Carly Fiorina


Carly Fiorina, pausing to visualize sugarplum fairies and fetuses dancing in her head.

At some point, Carly Fiorina with have to pay some piper or another for the vacation from truth and beauty she has taken at our expense. Hopefully, it will be repaid at her expense, I don't know, by her being cast out into the hinterland where such prevaricators deserve to be tossed.

But maybe not just yet, as it seems a rabid Republican base has found her momentarily useful. Perhaps they find her useful as the arbiter of what pro-lifers can hold up as symbols of their disdain for women having any sense of control over their bodies. Because, dynamic woman that Carly Fiorina ostensibly is, all the other dynamic women are supposed to take their turn as vessels for reproduction whether they like it or not. I wonder how pro-life Carly managed to spend a life as a woman without letting her uterus kick into high gear. Just asking.

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate doesn't ponder these questions of womanhood so much as question how Carly Fiorina, currently in second place in polling for the GOP nominee in 2016, can get away with pressing forward in a fact-free zone:
Not even the most robust defenders of Fiorina’s defense can say much more than that some of the images grafted onto the sound bite might not be completely false. And yet there is still no word from Fiorina, her campaign, or her super-PAC to indicate that she misspoke, or misremembered, or confused some other video with a video about Planned Parenthood. There seems to be no place in the middle for Fiorina to just put out a statement saying, “Hey, I misspoke. Sorry.”
This is an extraordinary moment in the annals of political deception. No walk-back, no clarification, just a persistent insistence that a video that doesn’t exist and can’t even be manufactured in the underground labs of political deception is really out there but, like the Emperor’s new clothes, only the virtuous can see it. In Fiorina’s world and the world posited by Goldberg, if people want to believe the big lie about the kicking fetus and the brain harvesting badly enough, who are we to tell them it couldn’t have happened?
Who are we to tell them indeed. Let's at least take solace that we are free of her machinations, just as the corporate world has managed to remain free of her machinations in the ten years since her #EPICFAIL at Hewlett-Packard. We'll just let that bit of business history speak the volumes of condemnation of Carly Fiorina's character that the mainstream media deems fit to leave unchallenged.

For a glimpse of the extent of Fiorina's contempt for the truth (and by extension contempt for us all), let's go to her YouTube concoction:


Let's let Lithwick finish this horrid display:
Even if you like to take your facts on some kind of sliding scale, Fiorina’s Big Lie is beyond appalling: She wants to give as much weight to a fabrication she thinks you would like to believe as you would give to the actual health care provided by Planned Parenthood to real women who can’t afford it elsewhere.
We may wish we lived in a world where a candidate could say, “Wow, hey, I misremembered,” and the polity would say, “Respect.” Perhaps we don’t. But we can’t give a candidate a pass for simply fabricating a story and cynically hoping that it resonates enough to eventually feel real; not when actual people will suffer catastrophic health consequences as a result.
We have at least one true thing to hold on to: Carly Fiorina's moment in the spotlight will be relatively short before she goes back to whatever cave she hides out in while the corporate world is busily not offering her another chance to screw up a company. We certainly shouldn't -- and won't -- give her a chance to screw up our country.

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