Carly Fiorina’s week is, thus far, not so hot: she’s polling between 1 and 3 percent, and both she and Rand Paul learned yesterday they’re being booted down to the kid’s table “undercard” debate. We’ll miss Carly whenever she departs, but happily, we’ll always have this very fun interview in Glamour to remember her by, in which she manages to say only a handful of things that are baldly not true.
Fiorina has had a bit of an issue with exaggeration and/or misrepresentation this campaign season: pretending like she’d seen a nonexistent abortionist de-braining a baby in a Planned Parenthood sting video, for one, and lightly rewriting the history of her time at Hewlett-Packard. On Tuesday, God love her, she wedged a couple more misstatements into an interview with conservative columnist S.E. Cupp, part of the magazine’s expanded online politics coverage:
SEC: Glamour reader Lizzy Montgomery, 26, a field biologist in Los Angeles, wonders: “How do you plan on providing health care services to women after you defund Planned Parenthood?”
CF: Well, let’s talk about Planned Parenthood, and just ask how much they actually do for women’s health care. They do some things. But mostly what they do is refer women to other people.
That’s an absolute baldfaced lie, as Glamour immediately pointed out in a gentle, upbeat, italicized Glamour Fact Check:
According to Planned Parenthood’s 2013 medical services data, it is not true that the organization mostly refers women out; STD testing and treatment and contraceptive services—none of which involve referrals—accounted for 76 percent of the organization’s services. Fiorina’s campaign manager, Sarah Isgur Flores, responded to these facts by saying that, “for mammograms, 100 percent of them are referred out,” which is accurate.
Fiorina didn’t say a word about mammograms in her response, and her campaign retroactively massaging that answer might strike a lot of people as... say... laughable, but okay! Fiorina is consistent, anyway, having incorrectly claimed in December that the “vast majority” of Americans want to defund Planned Parenthood and make abortion illegal after five months. (She also told Cupp that community health centers would make up the difference if PP closed, which, again, nope.)
Fiorina also found time to pledge that she’d be tough on ISIS in a way that the current president is not: “I’m talking about more effective air strikes, guided by more special operations forces. Our allies, who are fighting ISIS as we speak, have asked us for specific support that Obama isn’t providing.”
Again, as Glamour was forced to politely point out, that ain’t right: Obama pledged $1 billion in loans to Jordan last year. Also, Fiorina’s plan calls for more air strikes against ISIS, indicating we aren’t already doing that. But the United States has carried out more than 6,000 of the roughly 8,000 strikes against the terrorist group.
Credit where it’s due: Fiorina did correctly state that emergency room visits are up since Obamacare was implemented. And she’s even learned not to say that they’re up “over 50 percent,” which she’s said before, and which is also wrong.
Another bright spot: None of Fiorina’s “I” statements had to be corrected:
I intend to win this election. But I have never spent a lot of time worrying about the future. I try to spend every day trying to make a difference. And that’s served me well.
It would have been fascinating to see some of this corrected during the conversation, rather than in the line edits, but you can’t always get everything you want, like a clear shot at the presidency or a single interview with Carly Fiorina where she doesn’t make something up.
Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
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DISCUSSION
Obama recently did an interview with NPR where he talked about the fact that all the candidates (except Lindsey Graham, RIP, you drunk warmongering southern belle) just keep saying we should bomb ISIS “more.” And he quite astutely pointed out that we are already bombing ISIS as much as our intelligence permits - unless we want to carpet bomb cities, which, like, war crime, or just randomly drop shit on unoccupied sand so we can say we bombed some stuff, we are limited in our bombing only by the amount of intelligence we have about legitimate military targets.
Of course it sounds better to be all “MOAR BOMBS RAAAAARRRR” but...guys? It’s not like we’re like “oh hey there’s an ISIS military base but we’re fresh out of bombs for the week.” Unless we want to put tens of thousands of troops on the ground to go house to house to pull ISIS out in occupied areas (and I’m sure Assad and all of the warring tribes and factions would just welcome us with open arms), there’s nothing more we can do.