BOCA DE LA MENTIRA, TEXAS — 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has risen from the bottom of the polls to place just behind current front runner Donald Trump.
Many attribute Ms. Fiorina’s recent climb in the polls to her good performances in the first two GOP debates, particularly the second debate. It was in that second stand-off of Republican hopefuls that Fiorina claimed to have seen a segment in one of the now infamous and highly-manipulated Planned Parenthood “sting” operation videos that several fact-checkers and other media outlets simply could not find. Fiorina has thus far doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on her insistence that the footage she claims to have seen does in fact exist.
Perhaps wanting to get away from the controversy over whether she was not entirely truthful about the Planned Parenthood videos, at a campaign stop in Texas over the weekend the former Hewlett-Packard CEO regaled her crowd with a story she knew would go over well in football crazy Texas. For many in attendance, they may have gone to the Fiorina event thinking that Emmett Smith — the former Dallas Cowboy — holds the NFL’s all-time rushing record, but Ms. Fiorina would ensure that they all left the rally knowing the truth in the same universe that holds the clandestine footage from the Planned Parenthood videos.
“I’ll never forget that Sunday morning,” Fiorina told the Texans in attendance, “as I suited up and got my pads on, I just knew that something special was going to happen.” Fiorina said that she knew going into the fateful game that she was just “a few dozen yards short” of the record previously held by Walter Payton. “I went into that game knowing I had history within my grasp,” Fiorina told the audience, “and every time my QB gave me that ball, I was going to hit the hole hard, and not stop until that record was mine!”
The game didn’t go according to plan though, according to Fiorina. She said that she “knew by the end of the second quarter” that she was going to have to “turn it up a notch” to get the record. She’d only managed to get eek out twenty-two yards from the line of scrimmage by halftime, which left her about a hundred yards short of the record. By the start of the final quarter, she was going to need 82 yards to break the record.
“So I reached down deep inside for every ounce of energy I could muster,” Fiorina said, “I was a one-woman wrecking crew.” When she looked up at the clock late in the fourth quarter she saw she had a little over a minute to get 51 more yards, and her team was on their own 20-yard line. It was possible; the record could be broken she thought to herself.
“I girded up my loins, and when that ball was snapped, I took the hand off and I hit the hole hard! I ducked, weaved, dodged and jumped over players. At one point three defenders had me cornered with nowhere to go. To this day I can’t explain it, but I was able to just jump about 22 feet in the air, do a somersault, land on my feet, and then take the ball all the way to the house for a touch down, actually a game-winning touch down now that I think about it! Yeah, it was a perfect undefeated season too! It was really my greatest gridiron achievement ever.”
Fiorina told the crowd she was going to “show the same tenacity in the White House that [she] showed on the football field that day.” She said that the audience could “rest assured” that not only was her story about breaking the NFL rushing record true, but that she would prove it once elected by holding a combine at the White House on day one, and she’d prove she has both “explosive speed, but also cutbacks like a mug, yo.”
“This country cannot afford to have anyone but the NFL rushing yards leader in the White House,” Fiorina said, “and luckily for America, I’m that person. Yes. Me. I’m the person. So, just go ahead and vote for me next fall, and you can rest assured you’ll get nothing but the most honest, forthright leadership you could hope for. God Bless us all, but mostly me, for all my tremendous abilities.”
