Carl Fiorina - Stupid or Lying?

Let's leave alone for now the matter of how you can become fabulously wealthy and positioned to buy yourself into a Senate seat as a consequence of your tenure as the failed leader of a formerly top shelf brand that may never recover from your executive decisions.... The fundamental issue created by her latest attack ad is the classic, "Is she stupid, or is she lying"?

Fiorina's ad points to Sen. Boxer stating, "One of the very important national security issues we face, frankly, is climate change", Boxer prattles, "Terrorism kills, and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather." Fiorina plays up her tenure as the (failed) head of Hewlett Packard, and states that she "chaired the external advisory board for the CIA", so you would think she would be aware of the facts, summarized by the previously linked article:

The Pentagon, in its quadrennial defense review in January, ranked global warming as a destabilizing force and directed direct military planners to keep track of the latest climate science, according to the Guardian, a British media outlet.

But that only touches the surface. Fiorina is either so ignorant of the issues that she does not recognize the enormous difference between climate and weather, or she's hoping to obfuscate the issues and confuse voters into supporting her by falsely pretending that there's no difference. Fiorina is placing herself in the category of people who sputter, "It was cold last night, and it snowed last winter, so how can the climate be changing?"

If Fiorina doesn't know better, and lacks sufficient interest in the issues to learn the difference between climate and weather before producing her attack ads on the issue, she is not competent to serve in the Senate - and she's giving us a much clearer picture of how she managed to cause so much damage to Hewlett Packard. If she does know better but is lying to score a political point, intending to mislead and confuse voters on the issue, well... she might find plenty of similar company should she make it to the Senate, but she's the last kind of person we need there. And that's before we consider that climate change is a bona fide national security issue.