A half hour prior to Wednesday's Republican presidential debate on CNN, Chris Matthews over on MSNBC's Hardball tag-teamed with California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer to trash Republican candidate Carly Fiorina, who unsuccessfully challenged Boxer in a 2010 Senate race.
"Senator, I'm a big fan of yours," Matthews began, "So tell me what you think about tonight. I mean, you beat her, and here she is back going for president. Doesn't make sense. Your thoughts?"
"Everybody has a right to follow their dreams but nobody has a right to win without proving that they really care about people," Boxer replied, setting out to demonize the former Hewlett-Packard CEO as a heartless businesswoman:
And the reason I was able to beat her by a really a landslide in a year that was terrible for Democrats was because of her record. She had laid off tens of thousands of workers. She pocketed millions of dollars in a golden parachute, was fired from Hewlett-Packard. She had been fired before that. And, I'll tell you, the people who she stepped on cut commercials for me, some were Republicans, some were Democrats, and some were independents and said they were so mistreated.
She actually had them training their replacements, people who were coming from abroad. So it was a pretty awful record that she had.
Plus what's incredible is when she was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, they were actually selling printers to Iran and there was an executive order that said no. And the SEC caught them. So, she's got so many problems. I say if the Republicans choose her, we'll walk into the presidency. Really we will.
The horror! Imagine all those nuclear printers that Iran may have been able to put online!
Boxer, of course, wholeheartedly endorses President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, which would, at best, amount to a 10-year push of the snooze button on Iran developing nuclear weapons.
Matthews picked up the thread by bringing up a hot-mic moment in 2010 wherein Fiorina snarked about Boxer's hairdo:
MATTHEWS: Isn't it ironic that she's able to run now as a feminist, as someone who was, you know, mishandled and abused by a male, Trump and the way he talked about her appearance. And now she can come back tonight, I assume, with a lot of support behind her just to stand up for her integrity and her gender, if you will. It just seems like that.
BOXER: That's fine. And you know, there's nothing wrong with Carly Fiorina's face. And that's so off base I can't even go there. But she should have realized that when she attacked me because my hair style was quote "so yesterday." So it's sort of crazy that she had attacked me on my hair. Now, it's true, I have many bad hair days. It's true, but people thought --
MATTHEWS: I always thought you looked pretty well put together for me.
BOXER: Thank you, Chris.
