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.

Ahmed in Texas Builds a Digital Clock. Adults Around Him Go Insane.

I assume that during the hours the clock was at school before Ahmed was arrested,
someone would have figured out there were no explosives in the case. Or not.

Enough is enough.

@HarryStopes I don't know. Possibly wanted to be arrested? Police played into his hands? Anyway, now invited to White House, crowdfunded etc

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/19/sarah-palin-cleans-obamas-clock-muslim-teens-sketchy-device/
Posted by Sarah Palin on Sunday, September 20, 2015

Kyle Smith of the New York Post decided a kid named Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for show-and-tell with a digital clock for proper reasons. His brown skin and his name had nothing to do with it. Instead, we should sympathize with all the white kids mistreated by zero-tolerance polices. Hey Kyle, don't you think zero-tolerance policies are one of the problems to be addressed? Don't you think that living in a town with a mayor who made her name saying she'd stand up against Sharia law being imposed on Texans might be another part of the problem? (The mayor, Beth Van Duyne, later stood by school officials and the police.)

How Conservative Intellectuals Falsely Frame Their Arguments

An advertisement, from colonial times, for "prime, healthy Negroes."

The Volokh Conspiracy -- a conservative and libertarian law blog I've been reading for years and which some time ago was elevated to a Washington Post blog -- has always provided me with glimpses of how conservative intellectuals justify the basis for their legal arguments. I've rarely agreed with their viewpoint, but, because many if not all of the contributors are law professors of some standing, I've had to respect the validity of their arguments. At least until today.

David Post, writing on the "Conspiracy" in today's WaPo, makes an argument busting the "slavery myth," maintaining that slavery was not in fact a "national institution."

Historian Sean Wilentz had a wonderful op-ed (“Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution”) in the NY Times a few days ago, about what he properly refers to as the “myth” that “the United States was founded on racial slavery.”  It’s a view of the nation’s founding that, oddly and ironically, aligns many on the Left (like Bernie Sanders, whom Wilentz quotes as saying that “the United States in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact”) with South Carolina’s pre-Civil-War Senator John Calhoun, who was the staunchest and most eloquent advocate for slavery, and opposed to (among others) James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass.

Fine. This is a straw-dog argument, embedded in the op-ed by Wilentz that Post uses to make his point. If you read the whole post, it's clear that Post is celebrating the notion that pro-slavery factions failed to get the Constitution to include language that would legitimize slavery as a national institution. To him, this means that slavery was never a national institution.

That's nonsense, and any academician worth his salt would never base his or her argument on it. The fact is that slavery was an American institution long before the Revolutionary War and long after the Constitution barely addressed it, and is a major factor in the state of race relations today.

I can't help but believe that the purpose from an historical perspective of Wilentz' premise and Post's support of it is to somehow delegitimize the views of those, like Bernie Sanders -- or Black Lives Matter, for example -- that we bear continuing responsibility, as a nation, to fix what we broke so long ago.

The struggle continues, in more ways than one.

Mainstream Media Flunks Honesty in Carly Fiorina Coverage. Can't Trust them Anymore.

Paper of Record setting record for failing the public.

Daily Kos joins me in condemning the press for giving Carly Fiorina a pass on her false representations of the monstrously deceptive, heavily edited, fraudulent videos foisted on the American public by the Center for Medical Progress, which is, essentially, a bogus group created to add legitimacy to an otherwise corrupt support of the anti-abortion crowd.

The worst two zingers:

According to CNN, this fabrication was "true but misleading." Except for the part where it was false. The New York Times has a special take on it as well, headlined Carly Fiorina Said to Exaggerate Content of Planned Parenthood Video. Said to? And check out how the article kicks off:

Carly Fiorina set off some fact-check alarm bells on Wednesday when she dared Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama to watch undercover Planned Parenthood videos that show dead fetuses. While the authenticity of the videos remains a subject of debate, Mrs. Fiorina appears to have exaggerated their contents.

As Hunter of Daily Kos points out, that second sentence is a true howler, a riot if it weren't such a maddening bit of dissembling on NYTimes' part. The entire set of CMP videos have been repeatedly investigated and repeatedly debunked. The contents that Fiorina "appears to have exaggerated" was unidentified stock footage that doesn't resemble her description of it. It clearly wasn't taken at a Planned Parenthood because if it had been, the CMP would have turned triple cartwheels making sure everyone knew it.

Karen Tumulty of WaPo penned a tribute to Fiorina's post-debate status with a headline in the same vein as NYTimes' coverage, reading "For Carly Fiorina, capitalizing on post-debate buzz brings new tests." The new tests?

One of Fiorina’s gifts is her quickness and agility when the spotlight is on her. But with Fiorina now seen as a viable contender for her party’s nomination, her comments will be examined more closely.

For instance, one crowd-pleaser at Wednesday’s GOP debate also came under fire Thursday as inaccurate.

She had graphically described watching a video of a fetus with a beating heartbeat have its brain removed at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and challenged Democrats to have the courage to watch it.

“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,” Fiorina said.

In fact, no such footage has surfaced in the controversy over secretly recorded videos by the antiabortion group called the Center for Medical Progress.

The video to which Fiorina referred has an interview with a biotechnology technician, whose company partnered with Planned Parenthood, describing such a scene as images of a fetus are shown.

This section, discussing the likelihood of Fiorina's being "examined more closely," came late in a rather lengthy article. If there's any good take-away from the coverage of Fiorina in the mainstream press it's that commenters on the articles almost uniformly detest Fiorina. Seriously. Why would that be?

Persona? One of contempt. People notice. So did Trump.

Don't want to comment on her looks, except that contemptuous superciliousness is not attractive. Might have something to do with people's negative take on her. (Not counting the press, because they are narrative-driven, and they like the Fiorina-rips-Trump-a-new-one meme.)

Wall St. Journal: Fiorina Not Truthful. Is She Finished? Of Course Not!

Carly Fiorina, smiling sometime before or after her whoppers.

I was surprised how many people called out Carly Fiorina for her dissembling -- that means lying, put nicely -- about fetuses and stuff during the debate. A lot of people chimed in. When the Wall Street Journal reported her deception, that somewhat cinched it.

Cinched what? That she lied? Uh, yeah. But did it cinch that she would need to abandon her campaign in disgrace? Of course not. Lying, even when everyone points it out, remains, in our world of journalism, a he-said-she-said proposition.

So, Carly, lie on! Good as gold! Hard-nosed liar, ready to take on the Donald, ready to lie repeatedly, maybe daily, about Hillary! Good on ya, girl. Pit bull material! It's your M.O.!

For example, she lied her ass off in her remarks about Syria, but she did it so confidently that, hell, it must be true! Here's Politico:

Carly Fiorina: “The reason it is so critically important that every one of us know General [Qasem] Soleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right now because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up [Syrian President] Bashar al Assad.”

Fiorina was referring to the late July visit to Moscow by the chief of Iran’s Quds Force, a special forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, in violation of a United Nations-imposed travel ban. She also worked in a jab at Donald Trump’s mixing up of the Quds Force and the Kurds during a recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, one of the moderators of tonight’s debate.

But the claim that Iran orchestrated the deployment of Russian forces to Iran’s ally in the Middle East appears to be based on a single unnamed source cited by the Israeli news site ynet.com http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4699809,00.html that has not been independently verified.

Russia has also had long-standing ties to the Syrian regime and been a primary provider of arms to the Syrian army in its four-year war against a series of rebel and Islamic terrorist groups.

Substantiated claims? Who needs them? Not GOP candidates named Carly...

Why Does Carly Fiorina Have to Play the Liar-in-Chief? To Win? Win What?

Hmm. I wonder how long I can get away with this crap.
Cheney proved the truth is overrated, so who knows?

We know that presidential candidates run for a variety of reasons. Carly had a book out. Maybe she wants to just keep her profile high for some later opportunity. Maybe she relishes her Hillary attack-dog status. I don't know. She comes off competent, it's true, but she sure seems pretty mean.

It doesn't help that she relies on serious untruths to appear decisive in her attacks. Here's George Stephanopoulos pointing out that she's making up key points in her attacks on Planned Parenthood, which she turns into attacks on Obama and Clinton:

Numerous investigations into Planned Parenthood, stemming from the heavily edited videos purporting to show that the women's health organization "sells" fetal tissue, undertaken by states, have turned up nothing. The videos, concocted by an obscure anti-choice group dubbed Center for Medical Progress, don't reveal any actual wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

That doesn't stop Carly Fiorina from making stuff up. If you watch what she says to Stephanopoulos, she doesn't actually says she saw it in the actual CMP videos. She just said she "saw them," not saying what and where. Typical. Here's a breakdown by Vox.com's Sarah Kliff.

Her other big lies are about Hillary Clinton, specifically Benghazi and email. None of what she says is true or proven. In fact, the Benghazi scandal was put to bed after no wrongdoing was found (by two House committees!), only to be brought back to life by the completely phony Trey Gowdy special committee. As for the email scandal, that's essentially a DC media narrative that has a life of its own, independent of any actual wrongdoing, either.

Here's Fiorina going after Hillary -- all lies -- in last night's debate:

So why does Fiorina do it? Some have said it's because other candidates give her money to do it. That gives her status in the race -- the one who goes hard after Hillary -- regardless of the truth of the accusations. Of course, not being truthful isn't a dealbreaker for Republicans. If you listen to how many times the candidates say that Obama was the worst president in history and Clinton and Kerry the worst Secretaries of State the country has ever known, you get a sense that truth isn't relevant.

I'm curious. Where does Carly Fiorina go from here, and will George Stephanopoulos be the only one to call her out?

Update. The usual suspects -- progressive blogs -- begin to present information and analyze Fiorina's habit of departing from the truth here, here, here, and here. For what it's worth, these blogs are all reputable, meaning you can believe them because, unlike Carly Fiorina, truth and reputation mean something to them.

Fact-checkers begin to weigh in. The fetus statement? Mostly false. Reiterated as false by Politico. It's interesting that no one seems to be fact-checking the Benghazi and email claims, probably because they are mainstream media narratives that are repeated ad nauseum. The media occasionally points out that they might not be true, but they're having too much fun with them to give them up yet. They will, and the stories will melt, except on Faux News.

Oklahoma Police Admit Justice Is Not their Concern.

I-40 corridor in Oklahoma: Police don't want

the free-money spigot turned off.

We've heard plenty about asset forfeiture, in cash, cars, and even houses, that the police have been conducting for years. After the big exposé in the Washington Post earlier this year, the Justice Department and a number of state governments worked to stop the abuse. It has been, literally, highway robbery.

Police stop someone. They have a lot of cash. Police seize the cash based on laws that were supposed to help stop "the bad guys" in the War on Drugs. When, nonetheless, no offense is determined to have been committed and no arrest, in the end, is made, the police simply keep the money. And it's nearly impossible to get all or even some of it back.

This article in The Week about goings-on in Oklahoma reminded me of how odious the practice is. But what caught my attention was this: 

The ACLUOK figures do not include additional seizures of property, like cars and houses, or confiscations by federal (as opposed to state) officers. A Republican state senator, Kyle Loveless, has introduced a bill which would prohibit police from seizing money or assets from people without charging them with a crime. Oklahoma police have opposed the bill.

Of course the police don't want the gravy train to stop. But choosing to openly oppose the bill means that the police are more concerned with money than justice. Where am I wrong here? This is a no-brainer.