Here's Glamour Gently Fact-Checking a Ridiculous Interview With Carly Fiorina 

By Anna Merlan  |  January 12, 2016 | 8:50pm
Politics

Carly Fiorina’s week is, thus far, not so hot: she’s polling between 1 and 3 percent, and both she and Rand Paul learned yesterday they’re being booted down to the kid’s table “undercard” debate. We’ll miss Carly whenever she departs, but happily, we’ll always have this very fun interview in Glamour to remember her by, in which she manages to say only a handful of things that are baldly not true.

Fiorina has had a bit of an issue with exaggeration and/or misrepresentation this campaign season: pretending like she’d seen a nonexistent abortionist de-braining a baby in a Planned Parenthood sting video, for one, and lightly rewriting the history of her time at Hewlett-Packard. On Tuesday, God love her, she wedged a couple more misstatements into an interview with conservative columnist S.E. Cupp, part of the magazine’s expanded online politics coverage:

SEC: Glamour reader Lizzy Montgomery, 26, a field biologist in Los Angeles, wonders: “How do you plan on providing health care services to women after you defund Planned Parenthood?”
CF: Well, let’s talk about Planned Parenthood, and just ask how much they actually do for women’s health care. They do some things. But mostly what they do is refer women to other people.

That’s an absolute baldfaced lie, as Glamour immediately pointed out in a gentle, upbeat, italicized Glamour Fact Check:

According to Planned Parenthood’s 2013 medical services data, it is not true that the organization mostly refers women out; STD testing and treatment and contraceptive services—none of which involve referrals—accounted for 76 percent of the organization’s services. Fiorina’s campaign manager, Sarah Isgur Flores, responded to these facts by saying that, “for mammograms, 100 percent of them are referred out,” which is accurate.

Fiorina didn’t say a word about mammograms in her response, and her campaign retroactively massaging that answer might strike a lot of people as… say… laughable, but okay! Fiorina is consistent, anyway, having incorrectly claimed in December that the “vast majority” of Americans want to defund Planned Parenthood and make abortion illegal after five months. (She also told Cupp that community health centers would make up the difference if PP closed, which, again, nope.)

Fiorina also found time to pledge that she’d be tough on ISIS in a way that the current president is not: “I’m talking about more effective air strikes, guided by more special operations forces. Our allies, who are fighting ISIS as we speak, have asked us for specific support that Obama isn’t providing.”

Again, as Glamour was forced to politely point out, that ain’t right: Obama pledged $1 billion in loans to Jordan last year. Also, Fiorina’s plan calls for more air strikes against ISIS, indicating we aren’t already doing that. But the United States has carried out more than 6,000 of the roughly 8,000 strikes against the terrorist group.

Credit where it’s due: Fiorina did correctly state that emergency room visits are up since Obamacare was implemented. And she’s even learned not to say that they’re up “over 50 percent,” which she’s said before, and which is also wrong.

Another bright spot: None of Fiorina’s “I” statements had to be corrected:

I intend to win this election. But I have never spent a lot of time worrying about the future. I try to spend every day trying to make a difference. And that’s served me well.

It would have been fascinating to see some of this corrected during the conversation, rather than in the line edits, but you can’t always get everything you want, like a clear shot at the presidency or a single interview with Carly Fiorina where she doesn’t make something up.

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