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?"
Carly Fiorina

During the Tuesday edition of MSNBC’s All In, tempers erupted when Republican strategist Rick Wilson told fellow panelists Cornell Belcher and Jess McIntosh of EMILY’s List that Hillary Clinton is campaigning on her gender as a mother/grandmother and despite that, her poll “numbers are cratering” on honesty and trustworthiness.

After Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s SuperPAC released an ad responding to Donald Trump criticizing her looks, View co-host Joy Behar attacked Fiorina for daring to invoke “women’s suffrage” given that she is pro-life and opposes ObamaCare. The liberal ABC host lectured Fiorina on women’s issues and proclaimed she should “be ashamed of herself. It’s not your face honey, it’s your policy.”

Apparently at least two of the Beach Boys are Republicans, but when Daily Kos's Mark Sumner used a GOP/surfing metaphor, it didn't mean “catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of the world.” Rather, as Sumner sees it, the party is heading for a wipeout.
“For decades, Republicans have been thriving on a theme of Me-firstism and an insistence that it's the sworn duty of every American to fear those who have less than them,” wrote Sumner in a Tuesday post. “Republicans unleashed the tide of unreasoning fear and distrust, then they climbed up onto their boards and began to surf…Only, that wasn't so much a wave. It was more a tsunami.” And now, Sumner added, GOPers are so unhinged that in the presidential contest they’re abandoning their own political pros in favor of unqualified candidates who’ve never held public office.

On Wednesday night, Sarah Isgur Flores, Carly Fiorina’s Deputy Campaign Manager, hit back at MSNBC’s Chris Hayes over whether climate change was to blame for the California drought. Hayes seemed shocked that Fiorina would oppose spending trillions to fight climate change as a “remarkable thing for a Republican, a believer in American exceptionalism to say, that there is this huge pressing challenge, it’s a really big thing that the world has to come together in. And it is not going to happen.”

When it comes to conservatives, liberal media types are lately really letting their snobbery show. On Monday, it was Mike Barnicle's turn to display his disdain. Guest-hosting Bloomberg's With All Due Respect, Barnicle, a regular on MSNBC's Morning Joe, declared: "I would want to live as far away as possible" from the 53 percent of Iowa Republican voters who favor anti-establishment candidates Trump, Carson, Fiorina and Cruz.

Carly Fiorina's seen a surge in approval ratings in polling after her excellent performance in the Fox News "undercard" debate in early August. But it appears that CNN's criteria for selecting which candidates get on stage for its debate in mid-September will leave Fiorina once again out of the main event, something the Fiorina camp is challenging.

During an appearance on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina hit back at moderator Chuck Todd for pushing the issue of climate change during a discussion on the ongoing California drought. Todd eagerly proclaimed “[i]n your home state of California, drought, the wildfires. More evidence is coming out from the scientific community that says climate change has made this worse. Not to say that the drought is directly caused but it’s made it worse.”

Yesterday, CNN.com published a attempted defense of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State by Eleni Kounalakis. An "Editor's Note" before the piece begins describes Ms. Kounalakis as the "United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013," the author of a book on her time there, and "a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group" (as in "Madeline Albright").
The "editor" at CNN "forgot" to mention one "little" thing, noted by John Hinderaker at Powerline: "... she was one of Hillary’s top (2008) fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State."

The New York Times is cranking up the old reliable "War on Women" weapon to target the crop of Republicans running for the presidency. Saturday's lead story by Patrick Healy and Jeremy Peters portrayed the aftermath of the GOP debate not as a tough, substantive debate but as yet another source for Democratic attack ads portraying the party as anti-woman: "Fear That Debate Could Hurt G.O.P.In Women's Eyes – Remarks Under Attack – Concern Grows That the Candidates Were Not Inclusive Enough."
On Thursday’s network evening programs, ABC’s World News Tonight was the only newscast to make no mention of the 5:00 p.m. EDT debate between the bottom seven Republican presidential contenders ahead of the 9:00 p.m. EDT event featuring the top ten candidates. In addition, the CBS Evening News skipped Carly Fiorina’s attack on fellow candidate Donald Trump for his phone call with Bill Clinton.

Republican presidential contender Carly Fiorina has to be Chris Matthews's worst nightmare: a conservative who punches back hard and doesn't let Chris control the narrative during his interview. Watch this exchange from the August 6 edition of Hardball.
