Carly Fiorina: Strong, Crisp and Effective if You Ignore the Facts - the GOP Debate Was a Fantastical Reagan Homage
Let us take one more tour of the battlefield before we retire to the gift shoppe at Ronnieworld to pick up some Fawn Hall Authorized Confetti (Guaranteed 100 percent Genuine Secret Government Documents!) or, perhaps, for the kids, a Junior TOW Missile Commander suit complete with Iranian flags on the sleeves. What we saw last night, and I stayed awake for the whole damn thing so I now know all I care to know about Chris Christie’s secret crush on Abigail Adams, was the triumph of fiction over fact, of fantasy over reality. In other words, what we saw was the most fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan ever produced. Congratulations, one and all. The final fealty of the Republican Party to total and complete bullshit has been sworn.
The first time I ever noticed Chris Hayes was because of a terrific piece he wrote for The Nation regarding something called The NAFTA Superhighway. This was a planned project that would be built up through the middle of the North America roughly from El Paso to, I don’t know, Winnipeg, I guess, so as to ease the transportation of cheap Mexican goods—and of undocumented immigrants!—around the continent. This, of course, would be done largely for the benefit of the hidden corporate masters of the New World Order. Hayes noticed that the issue had particular political salience, particularly in where-the-fck-else? Kansas. He also noticed that its political salience was not diminished by the fact that the NAFTA Superhighway did…not…exist. (There was a smaller project underway that Hayes correctly pointed out was bad enough.) This was an example of having something exist purely as an issue despite the fact that there was no empirical reality to the problem around which the issue was supposed to center. It was exactly the same as getting elected to the city council of Emporia based on your four-point plan to keep unicorns from grazing on the library lawn. This, of course, occasioned a book on which, if Wednesday night’s extended exercises are any indication, I wasted two years of my life. The whole debate was contested on the NAFTA Superhighway and, on that track, Carly Fiorina was Jimmie Johnson in that No. 48 Chevrolet, Bubba.
She was steely-eyed in her prevarication. She was relentless in her determination to launch pure crapola into the stratosphere. She smiled rarely. She glowered effectively. The woman stares daggers better than anyone I’ve ever seen. And, on many occasions, she lied her ass off with a formidable brand of armored certitude. If you eliminate “telling the truth” from the assessment, Carly Fiorina was every bit the winner she is universally acclaimed to be this morning.
By far, her most effective falsehood was her thunderous denunciation of what she allegedly “saw” in those phony videos involving Planned Parenthood. Here it is, in its gloriously fact-free entirety:
As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, 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. This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up in and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.
OK, let’s just state for the record that the scene described by Fiorina in her Grand Guignol palaver does…not…exist, not even in the creatively edited version of the videotapes released by the charlatans at the Center For Medical Progress.
Carly is being declared Teh Winnah! of the Adults Debate, having “flown up” from the kiddie table, and her hair-pulling catfight with Donald Trump was a thing to behold. Of course they all lied their freaking heads off so it’s really a question of who told the biggest whoppers and the fewest actual truths?