Carly Fiorina is a two-time loser (as CEO of HP and 2010 Senate candidate in California) who was invited onto CNN Sunday chat show to defend the anti-woman Hobby Lobby decision by five old Catholic guys.
Vyan's recommended diary covers the basics of the crossfire between Fiorina and the excellent Stephanie Miller.
I was struck by Fiorina's prop bit, allegedly a fortune cookie she received recently that allegedly said:
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Fiorina claimed that the anti-Hobby Lobby furore was just that:
The War on Women is shameless, baseless propaganda. There's no fact to it, but it's worked.
Fiorina was there as the chair of the American Conservative Union Foundation (according to the chyron), an arm of allegedly "the nation’s oldest and largest conservative grassroots organization."
She doesn't need, or presumably get, wingnut welfare, yet she's become a wingnut propagandist, after depending on the tea party wave to get her into the Senate.
And part of her propaganda mission today was to claim that all the "strong and bitter words" come from Democrats and the left.
So many "strong and bitter words" have come from tea party leaders that I'll just note a few from her home state during the time she was running for Senate, below.
The major California-based tea party group is the Tea Party Express, which is basically a grift for California GOP consultants Sal Russo and Howard Kaloogian (here's a recent example of that).
The TPE shtick is to send bus tours to contested places, put on an anti-Obama show, and collect as many email addresses as possible.
Back in 2009 and 2010, TPE's main spokesman and emcee of bus tour events was Mark Williams, a previously unemployed California radio talk show hater. (I saw him perform on the first TPE bus tour in 2009 in Albany.)
Back then, Williams:
regularly lambastes President Obama as a communist bent on undermining the Constitution, and last week likened him to such dictators as Stalin and Pol Pot. On his blog and elsewhere, he rails against Obama as an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug,’’ and “racist in chief’’ for his comments about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own home.
And on CNN, Williams said that "Liberal by definition is an enemy ideology to this country."
Williams eventually lost his TPE gig after a racist post on his blog attracted too much attention.
Z-list entertainer Lloyd Marcus was with TPE from the first bus tour, and is now their featured columnist; his latest column on the TPE website begins like this:
Decades of socialist/progressive indoctrination in our schools, media and culture, plus six years of Obama, has yielded a devastating unspoken consequence. It is the loss of who we use to be as Americans.
And ends like this:
Amidst the unbelievably long list of scandals, crimes and misdemeanors of the Obama regime, the damage that this evil man and his minions have done to the internal make-up of many Americans is extremely disturbing and heartbreaking.
"Strong and bitter words" can only "indicate a weak cause" if they are essentially lies. The Republican/tea party constant demonization of Obama and his center-left Democratic policies suffers from that weakness.
Criticism of the Republican/tea party relentless campaign against women's rights, from contraception to equal pay, does not.
That's why it works, and why stooges like Fiorina lie about it.