by CJ Clark, Columnist & Featured Contributor
[su_dropcap style=”flat”]T[/su_dropcap]HE NEW YORK TIMES carried an article about Carly Fiorina being the GOP weapon against their alleged war on women. Not only is she boldly going up against Hillary, but now is taking on Trump’s rudeness toward Megyn Kelly. Fiorina actually used the “M” word (gasp) to help those who didn’t quite get Trump’s bleeding reference to help be “perfectly clear.”
What is fascinating, though, about the article is the comments – 396 at the time I read it. Talk about all over the board in terms of feelings about her potential as President of the US.
Of course, the trend for those who don’t like her is “She ran HP into the ground,” “She laid off 30,000 workers,” and her dictatorial leadership as a “rock star CEO.”
Let me st
op right here and say that I am not writing about my own feelings about Carly Fiorina. I’m writing about the impact that reading those comments had on me.
By the 15th or so comment about “running HP into the ground,” I was ready to write her off. Of course, if she was fired by HP, she doesn’t deserve to be President. Of course if she spied on her Board of Directors, she is worse than Hillary.
Wait….she spied on her Board of Directors? Wow, that’s pretty bad. So I looked it up. The HP spying scandal happened in 2006, led by then Chairman of the Board Patricia Dunn. Carly left HP in 2005.
The spying was raised in several of the article’s comments, and several people corrected the accusation.
What if I hadn’t decided to look up the veracity of the accusation? Carly Fiorina would forever be, in my mind, sneaky and dishonest. That’s not fair and that’s not right.
But it is how we are fed information, and how we gullibly take in what we want to hear. There are 17 candidates in the GOP field, and 5 in the democratic field. That’s a lot of “facts” to hear and absorb, and hey, it’s still over a year before the election.
I consider myself to be thoughtful and questioning. I was really surprised how a simple comment such as Carly Fiorina secretly wiretapping her Board of Directors could poison me against her. Thankfully, someone in the comments called out the error and I decided to research. That was a wake-up call to me.
We are in a very important place in our history. We have issues of historic proportion both domestically and internationally. Our very existence is being challenged by bad people. We need to step up in this election, more than any before it, and use our God-given intelligence to look beyond the media hype and study the candidates, using credible (and probably multiple) sources.
I guess we can wait until the field narrows and there are fewer to have to study. I guess…..
Response from CJ Clark (Author): Wow. You’re a bit angry, aren’t you? I’m struggling a bit with calling out Carly for rudeness when everything that comes out of Trumps mouth is rude and mean. And he’s proud of being mean. But you actually missed the point of my article…CJ
Hey, you gullible C. J. Clark: Why do you side with the gutter impression that Fiorina made of what Trump “meant” as she inserted her thought (the “m” word) into his comment. Where is there any evidence that that is what Trump thought or meant?
Fiorina should be blasted for inserting her opinion into Trump’s remarks, and failing to chcek it out before spewing hatred toward hm.
And how about yourself? Where his your evidence of what you claim Trump meant???