JEB BUSH IN A DRESS: Top 9 Fun Facts About Carly Fiorina

Well, in truth, these are not so much "fun facts" as they are troubling evidence that Carly Fiorina is yet another establishment plant-cum-loser, one of a series employed by the Republican leadership team to diffuse grassroots support of an outside-the-system candidate like Ted Cruz (or, currently, Donald Trump). With Carly's rise in the polls, due to two solid debate performances, it's worth examining her track record to determine whether: (a) could actually win a general election; and (b) she would offer good policy solutions as a commander-in-chief.

The answer on both counts is an obvious "no". Here's why:

SHE SUPPORTS OPEN BORDERS AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

In June of this year, Fiorina stated she is open to legal status for adult illegal immigrants and full citizenship for their children. During her Senate run, she endorsed the California DREAM Act, which grants in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. Furthermore, she recently stated that border walls and fences are not effective at protecting U.S. national sovereignty.

WHILE AT HP, SHE WAS IMPLICATED IN A MAJOR IRANIAN TRADE SCANDAL

During her failed run at the Senate, the former HP CEO received plenty of heat about "hundreds of millions of dollars worth of HP printers that were sold to Iran -- despite a U.S. ban on trade with that country". In 2003 Fiorina had described the Middle East as a "growth region" for the company, with its main distributor there doing $100 million in sales that year alone. Fiorina claimed to be unaware of the illegal sales, which begs the question: what competent CEO would be unaware of a nine-figure revenue stream?

WHILE AT LUCENT, SHE WAS BOOKING MASSIVE FRAUDULENT SALES DEALS

Fiorina ran the telecom giant Lucent as it was imploding, a fact that she was able to conceal until after she'd jumped to HP with over $60 million in performance-based pay. A series of major financial sales wins were announced under Fiorina that turned out to be completely fraudulent. In 1999, for example, Fiorina trumpeted a huge sale of up to $2.1 billion of equipment to a company called PathNet. Problem was, however, that PathNet's annual revenue was $1.6 million and could little afford such a purchase:

In the giant PathNet deal that Fiorina oversaw, Lucent agreed to fund more than 100% of the company’s equipment purchases, meaning the small company would get both Lucent gear at no money down and extra cash to boot. Yet how could such a loan to PathNet make sense for Lucent, even based on the world as it appeared in the heady days of 1999?

It didn't make any financial sense. Just after Fiorina's departure, Lucent revealed that it had written $7 billion of loan deals to customers, many of them unviable startups like PathNet, which itself went bankrupt in 2001. Post-Fiorina, Lucent also collapsed as the nature of her vendor-financing deals became obvious; but she walked away with upwards of $60 million.

FIORINA APPEARS ON A VARIETY OF 'WORST CEOs OF ALL TIME' LISTS

Her tenures at both Lucent and HP were complete debacles. HP fired Fiorina in 2005 after she led the company's acquisition of Compaq for $25 billion -- just as the conventional PC business began to die. As John Hawkins astutely observed earlier today, her track record led multiple mainstream observers to list her among the worst CEOs of all time (e.g., CBS News, USA Today, CNBC, and ABC News among others).

FIORINA BELIEVES IN MAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING

In a series of interviews from 2008 (when she campaigned for John McCain) to 2010 (when she unsuccessfully ran for the Senate against Barbara Boxer), Fiorina parroted left wing talking points on carbon credits, wind and solar energy sources, and the damage humans are causing to the planet via global warming. As recently as this year, she asserted that climate change is man-made. During her Senate campaign, she also refused to endorse California’s Proposition 23, which would have suspended the economy-destroying AB32 global warming law.

FIORINA IS AN ADMIRER OF THE GENOCIDAL OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Fiorina has issued many admiring comments regarding the Ottoman Empire, which committed the Armenian genocide.

FIORINA OPPOSES FREE SPEECH WHEN IT OFFENDS MUSLIMS

After the Garland, TX terror attack, Fiorina likened Pamela Geller and her group of free speech advocates to "white supremacists demonstrating" and asserted that free speech is "provocative" when it offends Islamists.

FIORINA LOST HER ONLY GENERAL ELECTION... VERY BADLY

Let's turn again to John Hawkins to wrap things up for on the matter of whether Fiorina would be a credible candidate in the general election:

After beating [conservative Chuck] DeVore [in the GOP primary] by outspending him more than 3-to1, Fiorina went toe-to-toe with charisma-free Senator Barbara Boxer and got her brains beaten in. Surprise, surprise -- Fiorina’s disastrous run at Hewlett Packard turned out to be an anchor around her neck and the fact that she was such a terrible politician that she signed off on bizarre garbage like the Demon Sheep ad (IT APPEARS at 2:26) certainly didn’t help. In a year when Republicans picked up 6 Senate seats, Boxer waltzed to a 10 point victory over Fiorina.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE

In 2010, Erick Erickson offered an excellent summary of Fiorina's rather bizarre positions including:

Carly’s conservative record was thin to nonexistent, and there were many troubling signs that she held liberal views. From 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.

Executive Summary: there is little reason to believe that Fiorina holds any real conservative views, that she could win a general election, and that she would be a competent chief executive.

I call her "Jeb Bush in a dress", just another cog in the GOPe machinery designed to sabotage a Cruz or a Trump.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.