by Mark Adams

Much to my eternal dismay, I’m not jewish enough to refrain from blogging tonight, but will wish all a Happy New Year and hope you all have a prospersous 5767 (except for the ham sandwich eating Senator Macac-Allen, who should be looking for a new job in a few weeks.)

I couldn’t resist posting an update to Ara’s entry a couple of weeks ago about President Bill Clinton “barking” at ABC for the fraudumentary on 9/11 which twisted the reality of the previous administration’s anti-terror efforts.

Bubba smacked the clever “little smirk” right off Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace’s face in an interview set to be aired this Sunday when, in typical Fox fashion, instead of keeping to their original promise to spend half of the time addressing Clinton’s initiative to raise $7.3 Billion to combat world-wide problems like climate change, health care, poverty and intolerance — they sandbagged the former President. (HT to Judd at Think Progress.)

No sooner did Clinton mention the initials of the Clinton Global Initiative (“CGI”) in response to Wallace’s fouth question about what was different about what an acting President could accomplish versus a former POTUS,  a perfectly decent set-up to continue talking about the program, Wallace abruptly changed the subject.

Instead of following up with Clinton’s mention of the programs intitials (what does that stand for, what are it’s goals, what has it done so far, etc.), Wallace came out with what seems to have been just too irresitable for this wingnut hack.

From the (rough) Transcript: (my emphasis)

WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on fox news Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President. There’s a new book out which I suspect you’ve read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops. Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.

CLINTON: OK..

WALLACE: …may I just finish the question sir. And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20 20.

CLINTON: No let’s talk about…

WALLACE: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this…arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 911 commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in black hawk down and I refused to do it and stayed 6 months and had an orderly transfer to the UN.

[Funny, I keep hearing from right wing Blogistan how bin Laden just parrots liberal talking points.  WTF is this?  "Bin Laden says ... bin Laden says"....yadda, yadda.  I think Wallace got his wires crossed in channeling Bill O'Reilly  --Mark.]

WALLACE: Bin Laden says it showed the weakness of the US…

CLINTON: It would have shown the weakness if we left right away but he wasn’t involved in that. That’s just a bunch of bull. That was about Mohammed Adid, a Muslim war lord murdering..thousands of Pakistani Muslim troops. We were all there on a humanitarian mission. We had not one mission — none — to establish a certain kind of Somali government or to keep anybody out. He was not a religious fanatic.

WALLACE: But Mr. President…

CLINTON: There was no Al Qaeda…

WALLACE: …with respect if I may. Instead of going through 93.

CLINTON: You asked you. It you brought it up.

Personally, I think Bubba gave Wallace “what for,” especially in this exchange:

WALLACE: I asked a question. You don’t think that’s a legitimate question?

CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked why didn’t you do anything about the Cole. I want to know how many you asked why did you fire Dick Clarke. I want to know…

[snip]

CLINTON: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on Climate Change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about…

WALLACE: [laughs]

CLINTON: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.

[snip]

CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that think Afghanistan is 1/7 as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever…

WALLACE: [Laughs]

CLINTON: I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could. The entire military was against sending special forces in to Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise…We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible while I was President. Until I left office. And yet I get asked about this all the time and they had three times as much time to get him as I did and no one ever asks them about this. I think that’s strange.

Oh there’s more very, very good stuff there, but the teaser blurb put out there by Fox was enough for some of the Freepers at Wizbang to gleefully mock Clinton for “melting down.”  Actual quotes from the Cheese Wiz Bangers  Clinton Meltdown Over Failure To Capture Bin Laden based on a 10 second sound-byte edited from the interview:

I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!

I tried to get Bin Laden, really I tried! More than those Right Wingers. Yeah, that’s it, That’s the ticket.

What a lying sack of Arkansas hillybilly crap.

/spit

:: by Bob Jones on September 22, 2006 9:09 PM ::

Clinton is a proven liar. Why on earth would anyone but a blind lefty democrat believe him? Berger probably stole the proof that Clinton did nothing to get Bin Ladin. He said in his interview (a portion was shown on Fox) Willy said at least he tried. He failed but he tried. The hell you say. When Bush tried, he didn’t get him either, but he sure changed his comfort level.

:: by Zelsdorf Ragshaft III on September 22, 2006 9:23 PM ::

Looks like the Clinton Legacy is being writeen and he don’t like the way it’s goin’.

Life’s a bith when you no longer conrol the spin ey Bill.

:: by Paul on September 22, 2006 9:23 PM ::

That depends on your definition of what “tried” is.

:: by VagaBond on September 22, 2006 9:25 PM ::

Clinton never got 50% of the vote, a fact lost on todays donks.

:: by bill on September 22, 2006 10:11 PM ::

Sure it depends on the definition of tried.

You get the idea.  People who try and bring some perspective or (gasp) facts to the discussion there are considered trolls.  But there are a few brave souls there who haven’t gotten banned.  Good on them!

But the creepy freepees are there in force.  One more (if you have the stomach for true whack jobs). This is precious:

Today there is a drumbeat on the news media to call Bush a failure in some way or another. A failure on the war on terror because he has not yet gotten Bin Laden, a failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, a failure on the economy, you name it.

Yet, you will not see Bush on television pointing his finger and blaming the “left wingers” for this message. Instead, he remains possitive, ignores the noise, and continues to do what he believes is right for this country. It is because of that he will go down in history like Reagan did, as one of the great Presidents of the United States, despite his failings, like in No Child Left Behind and Immigration and in spending too much of our money on social welfare, failing to fix Social Security, etc.

On the other hand, Clinton has lot’s of allies and supporters out there who admire and adore him, even some in the media who say they’d love to have sexual relations with him because he’s such a handsome guy and charismatic.

And yet, his legacy is written and its name is Monica Lewinski. He spent his time in office betraying this country and his oath by diddling his interns, sexual harrasment under the law for which any CEO would be fired, and “trying” in some attempt or other to get bin laden.

You’ll notice nothing but excuses out of the Clinton administration for its failures. They are very vocal and “angry” about being accused of failures during Clinton’s two terms in office.

It’s nice we don’t have to hear that out of President Bush and his administration. Refreshing, actually. The contrast is alarming.

One President points his finger at us, opens his eyes wide, and lies to our faces while blaming his opponents. The other President puts his head down, ignores the noise and really tries his best to get the job done in order to keep the American public safe from harm.

May God Bless George W. Bush.

:: by Baggi on September 22, 2006 10:50 PM ::

And that kinda sums it up for so many of these true believers.  Faith in Bush’s infallibility is akin to religious dogma for them.  Try as we might, we’re only going to convince a scant few marginally reasonable folks on the edges to ever change their minds about what is, and what is not.

The only chance this country has is to follow Ara’s advice and get busy.  That, and drag as many people to the polls as you can, kicking and screaming the whole way.