As the main competition to GOP front runner Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz is always on the prowl for whatever political edge he may use to swing the Republican electorate his way. As reported by Michael Warren of the usually right-leaning The Weekly Standard news portal on Apr. 25, 2016, Team Cruz is vetting a well known former candidate as a possible running mate for the Canadian-born Cubano. But as it turns out, the would-be bottom of the ticket does come with a certain amount of baggage the party base may not exactly warm to.
According to a former spokeswoman of Carly Fiorina’s failed run at the White House, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO is being vetted by the Cruz campaign. Sarah Isgur Flores, who served as Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager during her shot at taking the Republican nomination, has verified her ex-boss is under the Cruz crew’s microscope.
Perhaps explaining why the “Carly For President” campaign died an early death, when asked for a few more specifics on the vetting process, Flores less than eruditely responded “Normal stuff.” But she did also mention that Fiorina has met with certain members of the Cruz campaign and has also handed over “financial disclosures and other documentation.”
While Flores has verified that “no offers” have been made, Cruz campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart provided an update to The Weekly Standard. As released by Stewart, “We’ve already announced publicly that we’re vetting prospecting VP nominees, but no selection has been made yet. When that decision has been made, we will share it.”
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But if selected, the choice of Fiorina very well may not be all that palatable to the decidedly anti-Islamic jihadist sentiment that’s pervasive among the conservative base of the Republican Party faithful. What very well could come back to bit Cruz squarely on his nalgas would be a speech that then-CEO Fiorina delivered on Sept. 26, 2001 entitled “Technology, Business and Our Way of Life: What’s Next” in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
With the 9/11 terrorist attacks just two weeks old and still fresh in the minds of every American, Fiorina delivered a fairly scholarly, if not bland, pep talk to the Hewlett-Packard corporate family. However, the bosslady made a point of reassuring a fairly small slice of the same corporate family.
As Fiorina stated quite early in her speech, “Concern for the security of our employees who are of Middle Eastern descent or who practice the Muslim religion here in the US and abroad.” However, towards the end of her rather lengthy speech, Fiorina made quite clear that she considered overtly Islamic jihadist Ottoman Empire as “a civilization that was the greatest in the world.”
To pique the interest of her listeners, Fiorina also described the Ottomans as a “continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts. Within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins.” She continued with, “Its armies were made up of people of many nationalities, and its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known. The reach of this civilization’s commerce extended from Latin America to China, and everywhere in between.”
Despite Fiorina singing the praises of the Ottoman Empire, others have disagreed with many of Fiorina’s characterizations as historical tall-tales and obvious swipes at Christendom and European civilization. Unfortunately for Fiorina, the Ottomans never even knew Latin America even existed until an Italian seafarer sailing under the Spanish flag discovered such. And as far as her assertion that the Ottomans traded with China, while technically correct, she failed to mention that the ancient Greeks and Romans were trading with China fully 1,000 years before there even was an Ottoman Empire.
Yet what may stick in the craw of conservatives was Fiorina’s description of Ottoman leader Suleiman the Magnificent. As she stated, “Leaders like Suleiman contributed to our notions of tolerance and civic leadership.” Again conveniently missing were the historical facts that under Suleiman, Europe was invaded and in his wake, the armies of Suleiman slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Byzantines, Serbs, Hungarians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Romanians, Austrians, Croats, Slovaks, Germans, etc.
And European Christians weren’t the only victims of the Great Sultan of the Ottomans. When he turned his eyes east, the Ottomans under Suleiman slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Shi’a Muslims living in the lands once known as the Babylonian and Persian Empires.
