Really, Carly, is this all you’ve got?

Fiorina, the disgraced HP executive who is running against Sen. Barbara Boxer in California, has released a new ad that she hopes will turn one of the GOP’s pet peeves about Boxer into a firestorm of controversy:

A week after her rival, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, aired spots attacking her tenure as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina’s first general election ad uses campaign footage from a well-known exchange between Boxer and Army Corps of Engineers Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh at a hearing more than a year ago [in June 2009] of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which Boxer chairs.

In the brief clip used by Fiorina’s team, Boxer has interrupted Walsh after he’s addressed her as ‘Ma’am’: “You know, do me a favor. Could you say ‘Senator’ instead of ‘Ma’am’? It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it,” Boxer says to Walsh.

Yeah, how dare Sen. Boxer ask to be addressed by her proper title? Who does she think she is?

If this “controversy” is new to you, you are probably not a Republican. The right had a field day over it over that summer. The YouTube clip of the exchange has been viewed thousands of times. And the fact that it never caught on outside the right-wing bubble seems to have confused them.

Notice how the headline on the GOP-Fox channel’s website at the time of the incident dripped with derision:

Boxer, the U.S. Senator, Chides Brigadier General for Calling Her ‘Ma’am'”

Of course, Walsh was a brigadier general in the Army Corps of Engineers, which is fine, but it’s not like she dressed down Gen. Patton.

What conservatives don’t get is that this is a dog whistle issue that only they can hear. To right wingers, the fact that Boxer is a) a woman, b) a liberal, c) not Southern and, in certain quarters of the right-wing fringe, d) Jewish means that she has no standing to speak sharply to a man in a military uniform.

Why, you’d never see genteel Republican Southern ladies like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson or former Sen. Liddy Dole “putting on airs,” as we say in the South, and dressing down a general like that.

From the right-wing perspective, Boxer’s behavior was, in a word, uppity.

Fortunately, most people don’t think that way. And the fact is, Boxer has worked hard to get where she is, and she has a right to be proud of her long career in public service — she has served as a Marin County supervisor, a member of the U.S. House and for three terms as a U.S. senator. And the generous margins by which she has been reelected is concrete evidence that California voters have recognized and rewarded her hard work. In her 2004 reelection, for example, she received the third-most votes of any candidate nationwide, after George Bush and John Kerry.

Substantively, there is a larger issue here. Whether the fascism fetishists on the right like it or not, the United States military is under the control of the civilian government. This is foundational to our system, and it means that a brigadier general is, in effect, subordinate to a U.S. senator, including senators who are not Southern WASP males.

That was Boxer’s point. She may not have expressed it in the most diplomatic terms, but she was absolutely correct in making it.

Here is what Republicans really don’t get. Imagine if, say, neo-Confederate Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama had asked the general to call him “Senator” instead of “sir.” Not only would Republicans not have been outraged, they would have likely cheered him on.

Or take this real-world example. On Tuesday, Sen. John McCain had a full-on temper tantrum when reporters dared question his provably false assertion’s about the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

“It is not the policy, it is not the policy, it is not the policy!” he railed, referring to the policy prohibiting the military from actively seeking out gays for dismissal — despite having heard sworn testimony just six months earlier that the military was, in fact, seeking out gays for dismissal. “You can say that it is the policy, sir, if you choose to. It is not the policy!”

Boxer’s comment to the general was minor compared with McCain’s juvenile, self-aggrandizing behavior, and yet there has been zero criticism of McCain from Carly Fiorina — or anyone on the right. Why? Maybe because, even though he still acts like a boy, John McCain is a man. He also happens to be a WASP whose paternal great-grandfather was a plantation owner in Mississippi.

What’s going on here is just old-fashioned sexism. The fact that the source of it is a woman just makes it all the more despicable.

And remember that Fiorona’s “Call Me Senator” spot is a response to the Boxer campaign’s ad spotlighting Fiorina’s record at HP, where she shipped 30,000 mostly California-based jobs overseas and simultaneously bought a fleet of corporate jets and tripled her own salary.

So how does Fiorina respond to Boxer’s devastating ad? By labeling Sen. Boxer as uppity.

This says much more about Fiorina’s character than it does about Barbara Boxer. It also smacks of desperation — Fiorina is down six or so points in most polls.

So, again — really, Carly, is this all you’ve got?