It's official: The man who will not be the Republican presidential nominee, Ted Cruz, has announced that he has chosen as running mate perhaps the only onetime 2016 contender more dislikable than he is. He passed up Huckabee and Santorum. Chris Christie? Not a chance. Everybody say hello to the one politician in America now least likely to become America's next vice president, Carly Fiorina!
Ted Cruz, in an apparent act of desperation, plans to announce Wednesday that Carly Fiorina will be his vice presidential running mate if he is the Republican nominee for president, according to two people familiar with the decision.
In an apparent act of desperation is a phrase that could be pinned on a goodly percentage of all Republican news stories in general these days. And it’s probably got an even brighter future ahead of it.
Just to get us back in the feel for what Carly Fiorina brings to the Cruz not-ticket, let's revisit some of the campaign trail greatest hits of the widely despised ex-tech-CEO turned widely despised losing candidate for things.
• She boldly claimed that a widely distributed anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda tape contained scenes that it didn't actually have, insisting repeatedly that she had seen them. And there’s much more!
• She hijacked a preschool class trip to an Iowa botanical garden, ushering the kids to her press conference room, sitting them down in front of a large poster of an unborn fetus, and lecturing them and the audience alike on her organ-harvesting theories even though none of their parents had given approval for any of it.
• She, an ex-Merck pharmaceutical board member, summarily ditched her previous open support of fetal stem cell use and research in order to hitch herself to the anti-Planned Parenthood wagon this time around.
• She insisted that Army General Jack Keane had been forced out because he "told President Obama things that he didn't want to hear." But Keane retired in 2003, five years before the election that made Obama president.
• Immediately after a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic perpetrated by a gunman parroting the same fraudulent "baby parts" claims that she herself had turned into a staple of the Republican campaign trail, she blithely dismissed questions as to the dangers of that rhetoric as "typical left-wing tactics" against her.
• She became perhaps the only candidate in American history to literally surround herself with puppies and still make it straight-up creepy.
That doesn't even count her previous campaign infamy for, yes, "demon sheep,” widely heralded as one of the worst political ads ever.
So there you have it: Ted Cruz, in one last effort to crown himself the party's Not-Trump, announces a vice president for a ticket that will never be, and that would be a campaign-trail trainwreck if it ever was. Enjoy it while it lasts, everybody. Cruz is essentially just playing a political version of fantasy football here—but with the significant handicap that all his players have to at some point agree to appear in the same room as him.