"People are just upset and angry and throwing her under the bus," said Jon Cross, Fiorina's operations director for her Senate campaign. "If we didn't win, why do you deserve to get paid? If you don't succeed in business, you shouldn't be the first one to step up and complain about getting paid."

The most stunning line in the's new report exposing Carly Fiorina's failure to pay vendors for work they performed during her failed 2010 campaign for Senate in California is this If you don't succeed in business? That's interesting. That's very interesting indeed, you see, because Fiorina most definitely did not succeed in business . As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she nearly destroyed the once-legendary Silicon Valley powerhouse, pushing it into an ill-advised merger that cost the company 30,000 jobs and tanked its stock

And yet after HP's board of directors finally ousted her in 2005, Fiorina exited with a $21 million severance package, plus another $21 million in stocks, options, and a pension (plus—my favorite detail—three months of tech support).

That's $42 million she received in exchange for utter failure, but still Fiorina refused for five years to pay the $30,000 she owed to the widow of her pollster who collapsed of a heart attack in the middle of her campaign, surrounded by reams of Fiorina's data. If this widow and all her other vendors didn't deserve to get paid, though, then why did Fiorina?

(Thanks to James Pindell for inspiring this post.)