I’ve taken my turn mocking Ellen Pao, but her story is hardly original. Failing up is so common today it feels like it is new, but it has been a feature of the human condition for a long time. Alcibiades is a guy who would be comfortable in today’s culture of failing up. Instead of screwing up the invasion of Syracuse, he would have run a bank into the ground and then run for the Senate.

In prior ages, society could afford precious few of these sorts of people. Mistakes were simply too costly to tolerate having too many idiots in powerful positions. In the post scarcity world of today, it feels like we can tolerate an unlimited supply of losers, grifters and charlatans. Hillary Clinton is 50/50 to be president, despite being a colossal screw-up for the last forty years.

Ellen Pao would have been a non-story, but the Cult thought they could turn her into a Rosa Parks. She was an Asian female with a gay black husband suing a gaggle of Pale Penis People, who make it their life work to oppress women. That’s what makes her interesting to the Cult. Her scam is not in trying the shake down the PPP. Her scam was to con the Cult into making her a heroin. Edit:That’s right. Inject her right into the veins of the culture!

I was thinking about Pao when reading this on NRO. A fair number of people who think of themselves as diehard conservatives are fans of Fiorina. She is polling in the single digits, but the GOP will find some reason to get her on the debate stage. The reason, of course, is she is a woman. To her credit she says the sorts of things you expect a Republican to say, which says a lot of about the state of the party, but the only thing that matters is she lacks a penis.

That’s part of the con, of course. Fiorina was playing the vagina card when Ellen Pao was figuring out what to wear to her high school prom. Twenty years ago Fiorina was doing the vagina hustle to work her way up the ladder in Silicon Valley. Like Pao, she interviewed great, put on great presentations and was outlandishly incompetent in one job after another.

In 1995 she was put in charge of Lucent Technologies, a spin-off AT&T. I knew people who worked at Lucent in those days and they still tell stories about the madhouse management culture ushered in by Fiorina. Bell Labs was part of Lucent at the time and was one the great research facilities on earth. By the time Fiorina was done with it, it had been reduced to an R&D lab for a half-assed phone company.

Then she moved onto HP. Her tenure there is talked about to this day as a cautionary tale about hiring the wrong CEO. It is easy to forget that HP was one of the great Silicon Valley companies. In the 90’s, they were the model for tech companies all over the world. After six years of Fiorina, they were a smoking ruin that has never recovered. Share holders had parties upon hearing of her firing. The stock jumped 10% the next day.

Now here she is playing the vagina card in the GOP primary. The climb up the corporate ladder, by an otherwise talentless hack, is accomplished by showing great loyalty to key superiors. The hack also is good at displaying loyalty to the firm in front of the right people. That was her game in business and she is doing the same in politics. She’s making nice to the leaders and defending the party like a lioness defending her cubs. She’s also going after Hillary tooth and claw.

Fiorina is smart enough to know she is not winning the nomination. This is the long con and that means angling for the VP spot or maybe a cabinet position. She will get on the stage and look good in the debates. By spring of next year she will be out of the race and have a good idea as to who will win the nomination. She will make a big show of endorsing that person and campaigning on their behalf.

In 2017 she will be nominated as Secretary of HHS and she will do to health care what she did to Bell Labs.