Is Carly Fiorina A "Political Outsider"?...Or Very Much An Insider?

A big part of Carly Fiorina's Presidential pitch is that Americans are tired of the professional political class, and they want an "outsider," like herself, to take over the American Crown. 

But is Fiorina really an outsider? 

Let's start with a few positions:

Russia
“I actually wouldn’t speak to Vladimir Putin. I would act instead.”

China
"Now is the time for us to put pressure on them. And I would pressure on them in the follow way: I would be conducting big fly-overs right now in these disputed territories in the South China Sea. We cannot permit China to control those. I would be giving the Japanese and the Australians the technology they’ve asked for and make sure the Chinese know it."

North Korea
"We should not be withdrawing troops from South Korea. In fact, now is the time for us to be building up our military. We need to have the strongest military on the face of the planet. Everybody has to know it, so I actually would be leaving our forces in South Korea."

Iran & Israel
"The first one [phone call as President] would be to Bibi Netanyahu to reassure him that we stand with the state of Israel. The second one would be to the Supreme Leader of Iran, to tell him that whatever the deal is that he signed with Obama, there’s a new deal and the new deal is this: Until you submit every facility [where] you have nuclear uranium enrichment to a full set of inspections, we’re going to make it as hard as possible for you to move money around the global financial system."

Looks like Fiorina won't have any political insiders shaking in their boots with those positions. Fiorina's ideas mimic those of neocon insider Senator John McCain, who Fiorina worked for as an advisor when he ran for President in 2008.

What about Fiorina's associations with government itself? It turns out, she has some very interesting street cred when it comes to working with it:

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One week after 9/11, Michael Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency, the electronic surveillance arm of the U.S. government, had a long list of problems. High on the list was the fact that the NSA needed a ton of new high-tech equipment, particularly servers, right away, to handle a vastly expanded, critically important workload.

Hayden called up the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina. “HP made precisely the equipment we needed, and we needed in bulk,” says Robert Deitz, who was general counsel at the NSA from 1998 to 2006. Deitz recalls that a tractor-trailer full of HP servers and other equipment was on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, en route to retailers, at the very moment Hayden called. Fiorina instructed her team to postpone the retailer delivery and have the driver stop. An NSA police car met up with the tractor-trailer and the truck proceeded, with an armed escort, to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

It was an early moment in the close professional relationship between Hayden and Fiorina. Five years later, President George W. Bush named Hayden director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Upon assuming control at Langley, Hayden decided that he wanted to create an ‘External Advisory Board.’ He once again turned to Fiorina, and she went on to chair that board.

Bottom line?

The whole "Fiorina is an outsider" schtick is just another dose of false political advertising.