Carly Fiorina is the most recent darling of the anyone-but-Trump-crowd, but I am not a fan. She turned me off when she referred to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei as the “Supreme Leader” during the second debate. On her first day in office, she’d pick up the phone and call him, and he’d take her call. “Supreme Leader,” she’d say, you open up those military and nuclear installations or else.
Isn’t there something incongruous about anyone — especially the leader of the free world — addressing a brutal dictator who wants to take us all back to the 7th century as “Supreme Leader”? The ultimatum that follows is rendered hollow. Remember when Jackie Kennedy asked her husband about curtsying to the Queen of England. President Kennedy told her that Americans don’t curtsy or bow to anyone. But that was before Obama went to the Middle East in search of degradation.
I was taken aback the first time I heard an American refer to Khamenei as the “Supreme Leader.” That was John Kerry during the Iran nuke negotiations. And I thought, WTF, did I just hear what I thought I heard? Amnesty International reported that of the 778 executions carried out worldwide in 2013, 704 were carried out by this man’s regime.
Much to his credit, Donald Trump told the Daily Caller that he refuses to use the word. “When Obama talks about the ‘supreme leader, ’ it’s almost like he’s got total admiration for him,” said Trump. It’s disgusting and immoral to honor a mass murderer in this way. If Carly can’t figure that out, she’s not smart enough to be our next President.
I also don’t care for her tough John Wayne imitation. It’s not convincing. “Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all,” she said. Really? Did the meeting not go very well? Would she care to tell us more about it?
Trump, on the other hand, said he’d first try to work things out with Putin. If he couldn’t, well he’d “probably have to take a different path.” But first he’d talk. You see, Trump believes that if you are respected as a leader you have an advantage. And unlike Obama, he’d be respected. So who sounds like a blusterer here — Fiorina or Trump?
There are other things about Fiorina I don’t like. Her answer to what woman she’d like to see on U.S. currency, for example. She responded like a smarmy librarian with a lecture about why we don’t need a woman on our currency. That was a non sequitur, designed to show she was above playing the gender card. Only she’d already played it when she couldn’t wait to tweet her feminine solidarity with Megan Kelly. She was the first Republican to support the liberal media’s “blood libel” against Trump.
I preferred Trump’s nomination of his daughter, Ivanka, who was sitting in the audience. As a mother, it rang true to me. He openly expressed his love and admiration for her. A father doesn’t need to be objective.
And finally, I don’t like that face she makes — the one that expresses a certain superiority and disdain that Hillary Clinton could only hope to approximate. It’s the one Trump complained of — where she looks down and screws up her face as if she’d just bitten into a particularly sour lemon. Trump’s right. That face would quickly become tiresome over the course of a campaign.
Carly may be an “outsider,” but she acts like a politician. She rattles off consultant-prepared talking points. She comes across as a high school student playing the part of a political candidate. Her passion doesn’t ring true. And if the Americans who are flocking to Trump want a politician, there are a lot of better ones running for the Republican nomination.
