LESTER, IOWA — While she is climbing in several polls, 2016 Republican contender Carly Fiorina has already begun creating a reputation for herself, and that reputation is one of a woman willing to be bold and say things no one else is willing or capable to say, even if those things can’t be independently verified by fact checkers.
Whether she’s telling the nation about a scene in a Planned Parenthood sting operation video that doesn’t exist, telling the press about the time she broke Walter Payton’s NFL rushing record, the time she cured cancer and scaled Mt. Everest in the same day, or she’s telling everyone she has proof that the moon landing was a hoax, Fiorina has shown time and again that she will say what’s on her mind, even when what’s on her mind doesn’t make sense in the traditional meaning of the word. At a recent campaign stop in Iowa, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO one again showed her penchant for the extraordinary as she regaled her audience with a truly fascinating tale.
“There I was, going almost Mach I and I got an email on my Blackberry,” Fiorina told the crowd, “and it was from former-Vice President Dick Cheney. He told me that I needed to turn my fighter jet around and engage with some commercial airliners that had been hijacked by Saudi terrorists.” Fiorina said it was the morning of September 11th, 2001, and she had been attempting to break the sound barrier in her very own jet that she personally designed from the smallest nut to the largest bolt, when Cheney contacted her to try and stop the attacks from happening against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Fiorina says that she stopped her “important pioneering effort” to break the sound barrier immediately and “tried to answer the call of duty.” She says that while she wanted to be the first female to break the sound barrier, which she was “very convinced” she would be if she’d succeeded, she knew defending her nation was far more important. “So I put my dreams of being the very first woman in the history of the world to break the sound barrier — and rest assured, I would be that woman and no other woman ever did it before me, that’s a fact and you can’t prove otherwise — aside and I flew that jet as fast as I could to try and intercept the planes headed for the World Trade Center.”
“I was pushing my jet as much as I could,” Fiorina told the crowd, “and I was gaining on the first two planes! Of course, I was pushing the jet so hard I naturally broke the sound barrier and then some, but I didn’t have time to pat myself on the back; that would have to come later. I pressed the plane harder and harder, I had to make it. I just had to make it.” Fiorina was mopping sweat from her brow now as she ramped up the intensity of the story telling. She said Cheney was communicating in her earpiece the whole time, urging her forward, telling her not to give up.
Alas, Fiorina told her audience, she was not able to stop any of the attacks that day, no matter how hard she tried. “As I pulled into Manhattan’s airspace I could just see the second plane strike the second tower,” she said, “and I knew as much as I was a hero and should be remembered as such one day if I ran for president, that I wasn’t able to help Vice-President Cheney stop the attacks. Rest assured, all of this happened, and rest assured I can prove it all happened.”
“Some have said that nothing about this story jives with either history or reality,” Fiorina said as she was winding the rally down, “but don’t listen to those lamestream media haters. I am the utmost authority on truth and forthright accounting of the facts. Sure, it’s possible I made all of this stuff up in the same delusional fever dream I saw the scene in the sting video in, but what’s more likely — that I’m lying about this and everything else, or that I flew a jet past the speed of sound and nearly stopped 9/11? Exactly. I rest my case. God Bless America, but also, in a lot of ways, God Bless Me, Carly Fiorina.”
