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Talk about contrasts. I interviewed both women currently running for president the same day: Carly Fiorina by telephone in the morning and Hillary Clinton face-to-face in the afternoon of December 29th. Carly is conservative and Hillary is a leftist. Carly spent her career in the private sector, becoming the first and only female CEO of a Fortune 50 company. Hillary has spent her career in government. Carly is a leader. Hillary is a manager. Carly has a positive favorability rating. Hillary’s is negative. I’d love to watch them debate one on one.
They both appeared on the same “Meet the Press” broadcast in September, though at different times, and I asked Carly: “Chuck Todd interviewed Hillary Clinton first and he seemed to be almost worshipful as he did so. Then you came on and he got the daggers out. The tone was drastically different [because you’re a pro-life woman]. If you should surge in the polls, do you see mainstream media as a possible obstacle to your nomination and election?”
“Well, the mainstream media is an obstacle to any conservative nomination,” she responded. “The mainstream media is hopelessly biased. This is not a news flash, and Chuck Todd was hostile, in part, because he knows, as Hillary Clinton knows, as the mainstream media knows — that I am Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare…”
“I would agree with that.”
“…I am her worst nightmare because she won’t be able to talk about the things she wants to talk about. She wants to talk about the ‘War on Women.’ She wants to talk about the historic nature of her candidacy. She wants to talk about anything but her track record and her accountability, and I will force her to talk about those things. So, the fact that the mainstream media is not on my side is not a news flash. The question is: who is going to be our nominee? Who is tough enough to stand up against that and throw every punch back in their face? And I think I’ve demonstrated I have the capacity to do that, and if we get another nominee that can’t and Hillary Clinton is gonna win.”
“I think about what happened to Sarah Palin early on when she was surging in the polls,” I said. “She became almost demonic to the mainstream media, so you’re expecting that I would assume — a similar kind of assault on you.”
“Of course, of course. Will they try it? Yes. Will it work with me? No.”
As one of the outsider candidates for the Republican nomination and I asked her about Republican leadership in the Congress. She said, “I’m disappointed in the leadership of the House and the Senate. I made no bones about that. [I’m] disappointed they passed the Omnibus Spending Bill. Increases our debt. Increases our spending levels and there are a couple of good things buried in there, but basically the Democrats got what they wanted, so yeah I’m very disappointed. Frankly all of my energy right now, and I think where most of our energy needs to be for the time being is electing a nominee who can beat Hillary Clinton. Because it’s pretty clear that without leadership in the White House, we’re not going to get leadership that can change things for the better in the House and the Senate. Tom, you’ve probably heard me say before, there’s a big difference between management and leadership. The political class of both parties are managers.
They operate within the system. Well, operating within the system isn’t working for the American people anymore. It’s why I’m running for president. It’s why I’ve rolled out a blueprint to take back our country. Because until you challenge this system at its core — by for example radically simplifying the tax code — and changing the way government budgets our money, until we change this system at its core, — which is going to take an outsider with executive experience — we’re going keep getting deals we don’t like. Government is going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger as it has for forty years under Republicans and Democrats alike. You can’t keep doing the same things and expect a different answer.”
“The UK recently declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization,” I said. “Do you think the United States should also?”
“Well, it’s clear they are. Declaring someone a terrorist organization doesn’t necessarily mean anything with this administration. Yes, I think it might be helpful, but what I think would be more helpful is if this administration actually had a strategy to defeat ISIS. If Hillary Clinton actually had a strategy to defeat ISIS. She doesn’t. If Donald Trump actually had a strategy to defeat ISIS, he doesn’t. We need to defeat ISIS. Let’s just start with that, because they are the most clear and present danger… This administration, without a doubt, has been, umm, a kind way to say it would be say ‘overly politically correct.’
An accurate way to say it would be ‘delusional.’ They have been denying the nature of the threat. They have been willful in terms of ignoring facts. It is delusional to go to Paris a couple of weeks after a terrorist attack and talk about global warming. And it is ignoring of the facts to continue to say: ‘Our strategy is working,’ and ‘ISIS is contained,’ the day of a terrorist attack in the United States.”
Podcast of my Fiorina interview
I’d love to watch Carly debate Hillary this fall, but first she has to win an uphill fight for the Republican nomination.
3 comments:
Interesting how your previous column dealt with lies, and yet in this one you completely ignore Fiorina's history of lies. For example, how she was even called out by Fox News for her dishonesty about Obama's job record:
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/11/01/fox-news-turns-carly-fiorina-busts-lying-obamas-jobs-record.html
And how could you possibly ignore her blatant abortion video lie!
Carly Fiorina is unique among all the candidates in the Republican presidential field for her visceral, aggressive hatred for anything resembling truth. Other candidates lie, of course, but they at least go to the trouble of dressing up their lies with weasel words and other forms of qualifying language that allow them to squirm their way out of fact checks. Fiorina doesn’t care about any of that. She makes firm, declarative statements that are unquestionably inaccurate, and when confronted with inarguable facts that prove her wrong, she insists against all evidence that she is correct and bristles at the very notion that anyone might challenger her. She does not care. She does not pretend to care. As far as Fiorina’s concerned, the fact that she said it is what makes it true.
Up until this week, the prime example of this phenomenon was the Planned Parenthood video she claimed to have seen showing “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.’” That video doesn’t exist, and when confronted with the truth, she insisted her lie was true and lashed out at her critics with wholly un-righteous umbrage. “I’ve seen the footage. And I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact-checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist.”
That already egregious example of gross fibbery has, implausibly, been supplanted by an even larger whopper. At this week’s Republican debate, Fiorina listed off a number of retired generals – “Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn” – whom she would “bring back” into service. “Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear,” she said. Citing David Petraeus made absolutely no sense – he retired because Obama nominated him as CIA director, and then he resigned because of a security breach related to the extramarital affair he was having. But invoking Gen. Jack Keane was the real howler of the bunch, given that he retired in 2003, a full five years before Obama was elected president. Keane confirmed to Fox News that he’s never even spoken to President Obama, and that Fiorina’s assessment was “not accurate.”
The irony here is that Fiorina is at this very moment not listening to Gen. Keane, because he’s trying to tell her she’s wrong and Fiorina is having none of it.
I’m fascinated by this pathological commitment to dishonesty, and also by the treatment it receives from the press. Reporters tend to be gun-shy when it comes to labeling untrue statements from politicians as “false” or “lies” because it’s assumed to be a form of improper editorialization. But in an instance like this, there is no way to plausibly interpret what Fiorina is doing as anything other than lying. And yet, the press still dances around the unquestionable dishonesty on display here.
Salon Magazine
Many more examples of lies:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/carly-fiorinas-revisionism-problem
I believe that ignoring all the negatives and only talking about the "positives" is what constitutes a "fluff" piece of journalism.
No mention of her horrible job at HP?
And if you want an honest conservative look, here is what the right wing TownHall site had to say:
her praise of Jesse Jackson, to her playing the race and gender cards against DeVore, to her support for the Wall Street bailouts, to her qualified support for the Obama stimulus, to her past support for taxation of sales on the Internet, to her waffling on immigration, to her support for Sonia Sotomayor, to her Master’s thesis advocating greater federal control of local education, to her past support for weakening California’s Proposition 13, to her statement to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that Roe v. Wade is “a decided issue,” Carly Fiorina’s oft-repeated claim to be a “lifelong conservative” was only plausible in the universe of NRSC staffers who recruited her in the first place.
...She endorsed Federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research for “extra” embyros.
She endorsed the California DREAM Act, which grants in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.
She refused to endorse California’s Proposition 23, which suspends the job-killing AB 32 climate-change law.
Fiorina is to Truth as Trump is to Modesty
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