Carly Fiorina: I'm Hillary's Only Real Critic

Carly Fiorina wants you to know that no one is tougher on Hillary Clinton than she is. Or at least, that's what she thinks. In an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, Fiorina claimed that she was Clinton's only real critic, blasting rival candidate and brash business mogul Donald Trump for not going after the former Secretary of State harder, and she insinuated that Clinton and President Obama were largely responsible for the recent refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

"For heaven's sakes, I actually wish Mr. Trump would throw a little more heat Hillary Clinton's way," the former Hewlett Packard CEO complained to Fox host Ed Henry. "I feel sometimes as though I'm the only candidate who's consistently been critical of her."

There were plenty of things wrong with her statement, but the most glaring of all is the part where Fiorina claimed she was "the only candidate" to consistently invoke the name "Clinton" in her disparaging remarks against rival Democrats. Since the launch of the GOP presidential rat race this past spring, the official Republican Party platform seems to have shifted from "Look at what Obama did!" to "Hillary Clinton is a terrible human."

A constant barrage of anti-Hillary imagery has desensitized the public to the point where they almost don't care anymore. As The New York Times pointed out in April this year, the right wasn't afraid to come out swinging from the start, slamming Clinton's use of a private email server, denouncing her Iowa rallies and campaign stops as "inauthentic," and even referencing her husband's infidelity in vicious attacks against the former FLOTUS.

This sort of anti-Hillary platform has only been bolstered by several waves of her emails getting released over the past few months — the most recent of which came out last Monday. According to a report by The Washington Post, which scoured the 7,000 new documents looking for juicy tidbits or controversial missives, Clinton and her family purportedly paid a State Department staffer to set up and occasionally maintain her private server throughout her tenure as Secretary. Though the Clinton camp claimed that the move was kosher, her right-wing rivals, including Fiorina, seized on the opportunity to blast her once again.

"I don't think it's plausible for her to say, 'Oh, I wasn't paying any attention [to what was happening],'" Fiorina said of the debacle on Sunday, during an interview with CBS' Face the Nation. "She clearly was paying attention."

Fiorina was joined by rival Republican, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who quipped during an interview with radio host Aaron Klein on Sunday:

The Clintons aren't famous for revealing information. They are mostly famous for hiding information ... She indicated [during Benghazi committee hearings] that she had no knowledge of [some of the information in the new emails]. And I believe that to be dishonest. I think she did have every bit of knowledge of what was going on.

In previous campaign events, Clinton's name has been used by Fiorina's GOP rivals as something of a crowd-pleaser — the "red meat," as the Times put it, that so many conservatives have been hungering after. However, now that the anti-Hillary sentiment is starting to become unimaginative and predictable, many of Clinton's staunchest critics seem not to care much about their delivery. It's a sign that, while lobbing bombs at Clinton in your rally speech might draw some applause (and maybe even a few laughs), the narrative has largely played itself out.

In a series of tweets on Saturday, for example, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, who has previously attacked Clinton over her alleged inability to "satisfy her husband," opted to go after Clinton for her choice in teleprompter, of all things. "Hillary Clinton made a speech today using the biggest teleprompter I have ever seen," he mocked angrily. "In fact, it wasn't see through glass, it was black." He then added that Clinton "just [couldn't] read speeches."

The other lingering issue with Fiorina's claims is that the gravy train has begun to slow significantly. With recent NBC News/Marist polls showing Clinton's rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gaining on her, Fiorina's last-ditch effort to remain relevant by slamming Clinton couldn't have been more poorly timed. That's unfortunate for a lot of reasons. It's disheartening to watch as the one woman who could arguably have handed Trump a hearty serving of humble pie in the debate circuit slowly grows more and more irrelevant, desperately clinging to any imagined allegations she can find. If Fiorina wants to stage a comeback the way that so many of her supporters believe she can, it's probably best to leave to exhausted arguments in storage for a more appropriate moment.