Fiorina Pops the Liberal Bubble
A
It has been impossible to miss the shift in tone among liberals when criticizing Carly Fiorina. The timbre of their opposition to the surging Republican candidate has evolved from dismissive and aggravated disappointment to disproportionately seething rage. Among liberals, Fiorina has inspired passionate resentment, and it isn’t hard to see why. She has rather deftly infiltrated the left’s comforting and previously impenetrable habitat of fictions, and they vehemently resent the contamination of the fragile artificial environment they have constructed for themselves.
For millions of Americans who watched the second GOP presidential debate on CNN, the moment that briefly focused on the revelations exposed by a series of undercover videos featuring unsavory Planned Parenthood executives and practices was the first they’d heard of that metastatic scandal. While Fiorina’s rivals primarily burnished their conservative bona fides on the matter of stripping the abortion provider of its taxpayer-provided largess, Fiorina recognized the need to educate the public on the nature of that scandal. It is testament to her abilities as a communicator and the scope of the threat to Planned Parenthood’s privileges that the left has spent the weeks that followed the debate trying to discredit Fiorina and her attack on that favored liberal advocacy organization.
“As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes,” Fiorina declared as her voice reached a crescendo of indignation. “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.”
For this claim, Fiorina has become partisan Democrats’ public enemy number one. Over the weekend, a group of pro-Planned Parenthood protesters ambushed the candidate and pelted her with condoms. “Carly Fiorina offsides for telling lies,” the pink-shirted protesters chanted. The assault, and the level of anger that inspired it, should not have surprised any outside observers. This animus has been incubated by the fatuous and misleading coverage of Fiorina’s remarks. Her contention, liberals aver repeatedly, was entirely fabricated. In seeking to correct the record, liberals have only muddied it further.
“The enormity of the fabrication surprised me; the fact that nobody had ever seen this extraordinary smoking gun before stunned me; the fact that not one of the journalists moderating the debate followed up on her claim surprised me,” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick exclaimed. “Nobody — not even Fiorina’s staunchest defenders — can say that these videos that clearly don’t exist are real.”
“[T]he things Fiorina describes — the legs kicking, the intact ‘fully formed fetus,’ the heart beating, the remarks about having to ‘harvest its brain’ — are pure fiction,” Vox’s Sarah Kliff insisted.
When a pro-Fiorina super PAC tried to educate an outraged left-leaning press as to the nature of the scandal by reproducing directly from the Planned Parenthood videos the scene she described on the debate stage, the organization was accused of making it all up.
“Since it’s not actually possible to watch the footage Fiorina described, the PAC supporting her recently tried to create it,” the Nation’s Zoë Carpenter confidently asserted. “A heavily-edited one-minute video posted to YouTube on Saturday and emailed to her supporters contains clips of Fiorina at the debate, interspersed with images and audio cobbled together from a variety of sources.”
Much of the left’s self-satisfied critiquing of Fiorina is merely mimicking misleading reporting on the subject. The Hill’s Sarah Ferris contended accurately that the images Fiorina described were stock footage provided by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. Those images were shown over a testimonial from a whistle-blower who described a Planned Parenthood practice that consisted of cutting open a 19-week-old fetus’s face to harvest its brain. She inaccurately described that infant as “stillborn”; a claim that has found its way into even self-described fact-checking outlets. This contention might have been struck from Ferris’s copy had she bothered to review the footage. Stillborn infants tend to be deceased when they are pulled from the womb. This was not the case in the videos Fiorina accurately described, as The Federalist noted:
This is inaccurate on multiple counts. The video shows two different babies, neither of whom are stillborn. One was an image of Fretz, who was not a stillborn baby, but was born prematurely at 19 weeks and died in his parents arms. This image of Fretz appeared during the 8:59 minute mark of the video, where he appears to be wrapped in a blanket and have a clip on his umbilical cord to keep it from getting infected.Earlier in the video, around the 5:56 mark, there is footage of another baby boy around the same gestational age as Fretz who is not stillborn either, but a baby who survived an abortion and was left in a metal bowl to die. In the footage, he kicks his legs and twitches his arms during the final moments of his life, and a pair of forceps lays beside him. The footage was provided by The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a pro-life organization headquartered in Lake Forrest, California.
What the Center for Medical Progress did was to indulge in the common journalistic technique of breaking the visual tedium of an interview up with illustrative B-roll. If journalists are suddenly going to become critical of the use of stock footage in reporting packages to illustrate events that occurred where cameras were not present, they are going to have their hands full. Of course, to criticize journalistic production techniques in that fashion would be intellectually dishonest. That has not stopped the left from contending by implication that the Center for Medical Progress and former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell were lying, and the event she described never happened merely because cameras were not present to witness it.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has called for an investigation into the Planned Parenthood videos to determine if they were fabricated. She might be surprised to find bipartisan consensus in the need to conduct an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s practices. Based on the press reaction to Fiorina’s remarks, it’s safe to assume the journalistic establishment won’t be digging into Planned Parenthood’s practice anytime soon.
For two weeks, Fiorina has been made to answer for what the political press has universally dubbed not merely the conflation of B-roll footage with actual events – an honest and deserved critique of her characterization of the Planned Parenthood videos – but a willful misrepresentation of the specifics. There is a reason for this: the image of the moving, likely viable fetus out of the womb – an infant born alive during a failed abortion attempt – is so grossly disturbing that it has the potential to move the cultural needle. Those images present an existential threat to those who would advocate for unrestricted access to elective abortion. The videos themselves cannot be discredited in the absence of an investigation, but the Republican candidate who has become their chief evangelist can be. In that way, the liberal activist and journalistic classes can perhaps vicariously delegitimize the bombshell Planned Parenthood videos.
“This is about the character of our nation,” Fiorina warned from the debate stage. To her credit, she has refused to back down even amid a withering assault on her credibility from the left. The intellectual self-deception that they have summoned in order to contend that Fiorina made her claims from whole cloth is borne more out of fear than frustration. Their bubble has been popped.
1. http://prntly.com/.../scandal-fiorinas-biggest-donor.../
the largest donor to her political campaign has been none other than UNIVISION, the Mexican-American “news” agency that is having a public battle with Donald Trump.
2. http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/09/21/fiorina-carson-muslim-president-remarks-wrong/
http://fortune.com/2015/09/22/carly-fiorina-muslim-president-ben-carson/ says he's be fine with muslim president.
3. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/240947-fiorina-relieved-baltimore-cops-charged
4. http://gotnews.com/breaking-jesses-girl-carly-fiorina-loves-her-some-jesse-jackson/
5. 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.
6. http://chicksontheright.com/blog/item/30351-let-s-address-carly-fiorina-s-comments-about-islam-right-after-9-11
7. http://www.teaparty.org/fiorina-didnt-know-hp-contractor-dealing-iran-120411
Let's Address Carly Fiorina's Comments About Islam Right After 9/11
Written by Miss CJ
With the 2016 Presidential Election season well underway, there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking into a candidate's past to see what he or she has said about important topics before or, indeed, looking at their record. It's called "vetting the candidate" (and it's something that I'm certain Hillary Clinton would rather nobody do to her - but we do it anyway).
Apparently, this quote attributed to Carly Fiorina from when she was CEO of HP has been floating around social media and it's been raising a lot of red flags. It's supposedly from a speech she gave two weeks after September 11, 2001 (and if this was the actual quote, I would be concerned too) -
“…Not only was the civilization of Islam capable of defeating arrogant and proud empires. It displayed a complexity and richness unmatched and able to unite the human race under the truest and most harmonious way of life, that even the more honest of the kuffar are able to glimpse.”
Problem is, that's not what she said. At all. The people who run this website actually did a search for certain words within the quote on HP's website - words like "kuffar", which I certainly hadn't heard in 2001 and many Americans hadn't either. Which is why this quote didn't pass the smell test for them, and - to be honest - it didn't for me, either.
The full text of her speech is archived on Hewlett-Packard's site - the comments she made about Arabic history and civilizations are at the end -
I’ll end by telling a story.There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world.It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts. Within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins.One of its languages became the universal language of much of the world, the bridge between the peoples of a hundred lands. Its armies were made up of people of many nationalities, and its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known. The reach of this civilization’s commerce extended from Latin America to China, and everywhere in between.And this civilization was driven more than anything, by invention. Its architects designed buildings that defied gravity. Its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption. Its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease. Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration.Its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things.When other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others.While modern Western civilization shares many of these traits, the civilization I’m talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600, which included the Ottoman Empire and the courts of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, and enlightened rulers like Suleiman the Magnificent.Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians. Sufi poet-philosophers like Rumi challenged our notions of self and truth. Leaders like Suleiman contributed to our notions of tolerance and civic leadership.And perhaps we can learn a lesson from his example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population–that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions.This kind of enlightened leadership — leadership that nurtured culture, sustainability, diversity and courage — led to 800 years of invention and prosperity.In dark and serious times like this, we must affirm our commitment to building societies and institutions that aspire to this kind of greatness. More than ever, we must focus on the importance of leadership– bold acts of leadership and decidedly personal acts of leadership.With that, I’d like to open up the conversation and see what we, collectively, believe about the role of leadership.
And everything she says about Arabic history and culture is correct. The Ottoman Empire was indeed a thing that existed in ancient times. What's more (and what is entirely appropriate for Fiorina to mention as the CEO of a tech company), things like algebra came from Middle Eastern academics Way Back When. And that is something that has become integral in modern technology. She isn't talking about Islamic crazies who want to blow up Americans to show their devotion to their religion. She's talking about a culture that used to contribute to the world at large before a bunch of extremist nutjobs hijacked it and made it into something completely unrecognizable.
So, that's that. This was nothing more than a history lesson getting skewed for the sake of stirring up made-up controversy.
Now, can we get back to focusing on issues currently plaguing our country? Like the very real possibility that Hillary Clinton could become the next occupant of the Oval Office?
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