It all started when the New York Times’s Mr. Dealbook, Andrew Ross Sorkin, wrote this knee-buckling takedown last week of Carly Fiorina’s tenure at Hewlett-Packard.

Representative sample:

[I]t is curious to those of us who have reported on her business career that there has not been a greater focus in recent days on her “track records and accomplishments,” as she suggested she should be measured by.

Even more striking, Mrs. Fiorina, the only former female chief executive among the candidates, continues to promote her business experience on the trail, yet she was fired by Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock dropped by half in 2005. She has long blamed her failings at running the technology giant on the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the deepening recession in Silicon Valley after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sorkin’s torch job only got worse from there.

So Fiorina hit back – via her Super PAC, Carly for America – with this full-page ad in yesterday’s Times Business section.

The ad is an open letter from Tom Perkins, founder of the California venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an ardent Carliac.

Sorkin is nuts graf:

Huh.

Campaign Outsider Official To Be Fair Sidebar®

To be fair, Fiorina’s PAC man never actually said drop dead to the Times, just as Gerald Ford never said drop dead to New York City in 1975, despite the iconic Daily News headline.

Via the – yes – New York Times.

Infamous ‘Drop Dead’ Was Never Said by Ford

Gerald R. Ford and Marie Antoinette did not have much in common, but being misquoted cost both of them their jobs.

In Hollywood’s latest biography of the French queen, she denies having callously suggested that breadless peasants eat cake instead. “I never said that,” the actress Kirsten Dunst pouts. “I wonder why people keep saying I did.”

Mr. Ford, on Oct. 29, 1975, gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Mr. Ford never explicitly said “drop dead.”

Not to get technical about it.

But the Fiorinistas aren’t just ticked off at the Times – they’re also railing against CNN.

From yesterday’s New Hampshire Union Leader (tip o’ the pixel to Politico Playbook):

GOP candidate Carly Fiorina blasts CNN debate process

Carly Fiorina is surging. Her supporters are elated. Her team, however, is out-and-out exasperated that CNN might keep her out of its main presidential debate.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO’s campaign is also pointing fingers at the Republican National Committee. The RNC is putting its “thumb on the scale,” says Sarah Isgur Flores, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager.

The CNN entry criteria for the Sept. 16 debate splits the field into two groups: the top 10 based on national polls and then those who register with at least 1 percent.

“Despite being solidly in the top 10 by every measure, the political establishment is still rigging the game to keep Carly off the main debate stage next month,” Flores contends in a Medium post.

The problem: CNN is using an average of national polls dating back to July 16, well before Fiorina’s surge in the wake of her happy-hour performance in the first GOP debate. Fiorina says that will give three times greater weight to polls taken before the Aug. 6 bakeoff.

Memo to Carly: Live by the numbers, die by the numbers, eh?