Fiorina's Dishonesty Eclipsed by Trump's Sexism

WASHINGTON -- One part of me wants to bash Carly Fiorina for her persistent dishonesty. The other part wants to defend her against Donald Trump's persistent sexism. So here's both.

Fiorina's dishonesty is flagrant and unapologetic. Called on her misstatements, Fiorina doesn't cede ground, she attacks critics. Exhibit A is her evocative description, at the last GOP debate, of a nonexistent Planned Parenthood video: "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.'"

Horrific, but untrue. The sting video, released by an anti-abortion group, features a former technician for a fetal tissue procurement company describing how a Planned Parenthood employee "taps the heart and it starts beating," then instructs her to remove the brain.

As Factcheck.org concluded, "The video does contain images of what appear to be intact fetuses, but they don't fit Fiorina's description." One clip, in which a fetus appears to move, is credited to a different anti-abortion group, and it's unclear where it was shot. Another shows a stillborn baby, it turns out, not an aborted fetus.

Fiorina's comments could be chalked up to forgivable hyperbole, easily remedied. The audio from the technician is gruesome enough, and Fiorina could be excused for thinking, as the video's producers presumably intended, that she was actually watching the scene being described.

But backing down is not the Fiorina way. Repeatedly challenged after the debate, she repeatedly asserted that she was correct and that any disagreement was lazy partisanship from critics who hadn't bothered to watch.

"I didn't misspeak," Fiorina told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I have seen those images." Fox News' Chris Wallace asked her, "Do you acknowledge what every fact-checker has found ... there is no actual footage of the incident that you just mentioned?"

Fiorina: "No, I don't accept that at all. ... I haven't found a lot of people in the mainstream media who have ever watched these things."

This dishonesty is part of a pattern. Fiorina's up-by-the-bootstraps foundational story -- from secretary to CEO -- is similarly misleading. In fact, Fiorina is the child of privilege. Her father was a Stanford law professor, Duke Law School dean, deputy attorney general, and federal appeals court judge. Horatio Alger this is not.

At the same time, Trump manages to put me in Fiorina's corner. In Trumpworld, where women matter for their looks, there only two kinds: attractive, and therefore "bimbos" (see, e.g., Megyn Kelly), or "dogs." Which is not quite what he said about Fiorina to Rolling Stone but close: "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?"

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