March 7, 2015 5:46 AM

"Name An Accomplishment": The game no smart Conservative Republican should play

With her boffo appearance at CPAC, it became obvious why Carly Fiorina masquerades as a presidential candidate: She loves the attention! According to National Review, her CPAC remarks scored a hit, if only because she trashed Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State. Fiorina certainly proved her cred as a Fox News Republican. She eagerly parroted familiar talking points about Clinton - “Name an accomplishment!”…. “Name an Accomplishment” is a game that everyone can play, however, and I daresay that Hillary Clinton and her avid defense team have plenty of answers. As for Fiorina, she came close to wrecking Hewlett-Packard, a major U.S. technology firm whose owners and shareholders hope never to see her face again. Many of her former colleagues there consider her utterly without qualifications for any role in government, no matter how small. (They make her sound like a pretty awful person, too.) Beyond her dubious résumé, Fiorina’s most memorable achievement was the moronic “Demon Sheep ad,” nominated by NPR’s Ken Rudin as “the worst political ad ever” - aired with her approval, of course.

If there’s one thing that should be held to be unfailingly true, it’s that whenever Conservatives get together for CPAC, their annual equivalent of a circle jerk, the lies will come fast and furious. Fact-checking is actively discouraged, because the only thing that really matters is who can tell the biggest tall tales about how Evil, Nasty, and Anti-American those g——-n godless Liberals are. Few manage to do this with greater alacrity than Carly Fiorina, whose relationship with the truth is akin to Jeffrey Dahmer’s commitment to veganism.

Conservatives should be smart enough to know this by now, but the one game they should NEVER, under ANY circumstances play, is “Name an Accomplishment.” Of course, when Conservatives like Fiorina are preaching to the unquestioning, foaming-at-the-mouth choir, the only “truth” that matters is painting Liberals in the worst light possible. Accuracy and veracity are for losers and Liberals, and thus vitriol and cheap, gratuitous personal insults become the currency of the moment.

If they choose to play “Name an Accomplishment,” it’s a game those of us on the Left will play any day of the week…AND we’ll agree to a doubleheader on Sunday. When you compare the accomplishments of Democratic Presidents to those of Republicans since the Carter Administration, there’s no way Republicans come out on top. Unless obstruction, the desire to destroy the middle class, crash the economy, turn women into the legal property of men, and legislate the LGBT community out of existence are to be considered “accomplishments.”

Republicans have worked (and are still working) to destroy Obamacare…though the have nothing even remotely resembling an alternative. When your health plan is

  1. Don’t get sick, or
  2. If you do get sick, hope you die quickly,

You have nothing to brag about.

Few former secretaries of state can actually point to a single, world-historical achievement distinguishing their tenure. Clinton went far, and not just literally, toward restoring American prestige and alliances after the nadir of the Bush administration.

As for Bush’s secretaries of state, both share responsibility for bringing this country to a very low point: Colin Powell with his infamous UN speech on Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” a decision that he has since disowned; and Condoleezza Rice, with her “mushroom cloud” fakery and a long series of lies on the same topic. Hundreds of thousands dead, still more grievously wounded and left homeless, trillions of dollars squandered, and a violent Islamist movement rising from the ruins: Now there’s a whole series of accomplishments! Neither Powell nor Rice is likely to be remembered for much else.

I suppose it depends on how you define “accomplishments,” right? Try as I might, though, I can’t see how lying and fear-mongering your way into an immoral war that sent almost 5,000 young Americans home in flag-draped boxes could qualify as an “accomplishment.”

Republican Presidents have trashed the economy, stumbled their way into wars that had nothing to do with the reason they were being fought, broken laws, and presided over truly impressive levels of corruption, graft, and lawlessness. Democrats have not been without their lapses, of course…but they can’t begin to approach the level of Republican criminality, immorality, dishonesty, corruption, and war crimes.

If you’re going to start talking about accomplishments, you might want to make certain that your side even has any worth discussing. Then again, when you live in a world in which the truth is whatever comes out of your mouth and evidence is considered the purview of losers and Liberals, how can you lose? In your own mind, you’re already a legend. Carly Fiorina certainly is.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on March 7, 2015 5:46 AM.

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