To hear the glowing reviews late last week, Carly Fiorina won the September 16 Republican presidential debate. And by debate, we mean a spectacle of pithy soundbites cranking out revenue like a ratings engine devoid of judges, scoring, and winners and losers.
But as Josh Marshall and others have noted, Fiorina has a habit of just making shit up. Her problems begin when anyone with an Internet connection and reading comprehension skills outside of the cheering squads takes notice:
2) California "destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations"
[B]etween 1993 and 2013, thanks to energy efficiency, the average residential electricity bill in California declined, on an inflation-adjusted basis, by 4 percent, even as bills rose elsewhere in the country. Between 1990 and 2012, the state cut per-capita carbon emissions by 25 percent even as its GDP increased by 37 percent. ... Oh, and California created more jobs than any other state in the nation last year, with the fifth-highest GDP growth rate. And its budget is balanced.
[...]
6) "Coal provides half the energy in this nation still"
No, it doesn't. Coal provides 20 percent of the total primary energy used in the US.
Fiorina claims to have seen babies cruelly being kept alive as a tissue farm for Planned Parenthood. In fact
no such video exists. Doctor Professor Pastor Carly Fiorina has also been a regular critic of the Iran nuclear deal on the grounds that . . . something along the lines of Obama should have solved it all his first day in the White House with a single phone call to the Supreme Leader. And of course she plays up her business success when it's been widely reported how she bungled her own big merger between Compaq and HP so thoroughly that she was kicked to the curb by panicked shareholders and
fellow executives:
Six weeks after publication of this article that pilloried Hewlett-Packard, the board hired Mark Hurd to replace Fiorina. Only then did the company acquire the management skills needed to take the raw material that was there and transform it into a world leader in technology. In the three years since Hurd became CEO, the results have been truly remarkable.
Still, consider that the current GOP front-runner is a trust fund braggart who thinks China has collaborated with NASA and others to hoax us into believing several hundred thousand super accurate thermometers display local and global temperature inaccurately. Or that fully one-third of the GOP base and at least half of the tea party admit they are or were convinced that the government was going to
take over the American state of Texas a few weeks ago. Next to them, Carly Fiorina almost stands out as a scientific savant.