Bill Clinton get's Pissed

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"At least I tried"?

I would have to see the whole interview, but that's just lame.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/22/clinton-fox/

Today, President Bill Clinton taped an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, which is scheduled to be aired Sunday. He was told the interview would focus on his nonpartisan efforts to raise over $7 billion to combat the world’s biggest problems.

Early in the interview, Wallace attempted to smear Clinton with the same kind of misinformation contained in ABC’s Path to 9/11. Clinton was having none of it.

ThinkProgress has obtained a transcript of the interview. Here are some highlights –

Wallace repeats Path to 9/11 misinformation, Clinton fights back:

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 9/11 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.

Clinton takes on Fox News bias:

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right…

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t…I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke… So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..

WALLACE: Now wait a minute sir…

CLINTON:…

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…

WALLACE: We asked…

CLINTON:…

WALLACE: Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday sir?

CLINTON: I don’t believe you ask them that.

WALLACE: We ask plenty of questions of…

CLINTON: You didn’t ask that did you? Tell the truth.

WALLACE: About the USS Cole?

CLINTON: Tell the truth.

WALLACE: I…with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask.

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.

Clinton on his priorities and the Bush administration priorities:

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 thinks 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 into 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.
 
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Did anyone watch that interview?

That was really a :corn: moment. I kept waiting for him to say "I never had sexual relations with that man, Mr. Bin Laden :wink: I love how Drudge called it "purple faced rage"



Following today's buzz generating conversation with Bill Clinton, Chris Wallace shared some of his post-interview thoughts with FishbowlDC:

I was delighted to get the chance to interview former President Clinton. This was the first one-on-one sitdown he's ever given "Fox News Sunday" during our 10 years on the air.

The groundrules were simple--15 minutes--to be divided evenly between questions about the Clinton Global Initiative and anything else I wanted to ask.

I intended to keep to the groundrules. In fact--I prepared 10 questions--5 on the CGI and 5 on other issues.

I began the interview with 2 questions about Mr. Clinton's commitment to humanitarian causes. His answers were cogent and good-humored.

Then--I asked him about his Administration's record in fighting terror--fully intending to come back to CGI later (as indeed I did).

I asked what I thought was a non-confrontational question about whether he could have done more to "connect the dots and really go after al Qaeda."

I was utterly surprised by the tidal wave of details--emotion--and political attacks that followed.

The President was clearly stung by any suggestion that he had not done everything he could to get bin Laden. He attacked right-wingers--accused me of a "conservative hit job"--and even spun a theory I still don't understand that somehow Fox was trying to cover up the fact that NewsCorp. chief Rupert Murdoch was supporting his Global Initiative. I still have no idea what set him off.

Former President Clinton is a very big man. As he leaned forward--wagging his finger in my face--and then poking the notes I was holding--I felt as if a mountain was coming down in front of me.

The President said I had a smirk. Actually--it was sheer wonder at what I was witnessing.

I tried repeatedly to adhere to the ground rules--to move the President along--and back to the CGI. But he wanted to keep talking about his record fighting terror.

When it became clear he wanted to throw out the ground rules--then I just went with the flow of the interview.
 
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This is an odd moment for him, he's usually better at keeping his composure.


Regardless, I miss having a president who can have a intelligent conversation that flows so easily.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
A longer clip of the video. Yes I miss his intelligence and ability to articulate, but on the other hand he just looked so defensive and it smacked of the VRWC again. I hate to say it, but it was almost Bushlike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYNI5RPOlp4
Click to expand...

Well, Clinton has always had a reputation for having a temper.

Nonetheless, I thought he handled himself pretty well, considering. I don't think Bush could have kept talking that coherently off the cuff like that.

Clinton was totally set up.

It's incredulous that Chris Matthews would expect us to buy that he had "no idea" Clinton would take the bait on the issue of his "not doing enough." If he was being sincere, he would have asked the "extra questions" later in the interview after the "main topic" had been covered, and not two minutes in to the interview.

That's one thing I can't abide about the new breed of Right Wing Political Entertainers. They are so disingenuouis.
 
But most "non Fox" viewers know/assume a Fox agenda, so Bill getting upset like that was only giving them (the regular Fox viewer) what they wanted-wasn't it? Wouldn't it have been more effective to just answer the question factually? I'm sure if he had to do it all over again that's what he would have done.

The regular Fox viewer who sees everything from a certain political and ideological perspective, and actually believes the "we report, you decide", would just think he is covering up his mistakes by blaming Fox and its' agenda.

It would be extremely naive on his part to think he could go on Fox and that they wouldn't ask him about that.
 
Dick Morris has become the anti-Pat Buchanan in so many ways since the sleeping giant - the American public - had a newfound awareness of Islamic Jihad.

"The president [Clinton] had yet to make a finding that it was OK to kill bin Laden. The reason he had not is that he did not yet know bin Laden's connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The reason he did not know that is that he did not fast-track the investigation.

A second time, we did fire missiles but alerted the Pakistani military to our plans and they tipped off bin Laden, and he escaped.

A third time, our plans to attack by missile were canceled, partially out of chagrin over having missed him before and partially because we had just bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by mistake and were worried about being called trigger happy."
 
Good for Bill. I had no problem with him losing his cool like that on national television.

Anyway, if my memory serves me correctly, every time Clinton did something to get Bin Laden or to retaliate on the attacks on US personnel, he was always accused by the right of doing it as a distraction because of the Lewinsky fiasco.

I'm only surprised Clinton didn't lash out sooner :up:
 
LOL @ " hit-job piece "

The guy flips out after a simple question is asked. Just shows how bad the other networks and journalists are, they rollover and play dead for him and refuse to ask him questions about his response (lack of response) to Bin Laden for 8 years.

He must have thought he was going on CBS where Ed Bradley or some other old hack would be his lapdog for an interview and throw him softballs, and do his dirtywork for him like they did for Kerry when they were forging military documents for him.

When Bubba's face went purple, it was not due to the simple question being posed, but rather the guilt of doing nothing for 8 years and the guilt of knowing his own inactions led to 3000 people dying needlessly, and now he tries to act as the victim and turn Wallace into the bad guy, fun to watch a habitual liar and sex offender flip out when confronted with the truth.
 
TracyVegas said:
When Bubba's face went purple, it was not due to the simple question being posed, but rather the guilt of doing nothing for 8 years and the guilt of knowing his own inactions led to 3000 people dying needlessly, and now he tries to act as the victim and turn Wallace into the bad guy, fun to watch a habitual liar and sex offender flip out when confronted with the truth.
Click to expand...



what about not doing anything for 8 months, ending the weekly meetings that Clinton had about Bin Laden, igorning memos that said things such as "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the US," reverting back to a Cold War mentality, hiring a national security advisor who's area of expertise was the USSR (a country no longer in existence), the elevation of China into Public Enemy #1, firing Richard Clarke, not spending the $60bn it would take to make our ports secure, letting OBL go in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001 because resources were diverted to the unnecessary, foolish debacle that became the Iraq War?

i'd be pretty purple-faced about that.
 
ladywithspinninghead said:

Anyway, if my memory serves me correctly, every time Clinton did something to get Bin Laden or to retaliate on the attacks on US personnel, he was always accused by the right of doing it as a distraction because of the Lewinsky fiasco.

Click to expand...

Guilty!! Along with almost everyone else at the time.

Wag the dog was the mantra of the day!!
 
Irvine511 said:




what about not doing anything for 8 months, ending the weekly meetings that Clinton had about Bin Laden, igorning memos that said things such as "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the US," reverting back to a Cold War mentality, hiring a national security advisor who's area of expertise was the USSR (a country no longer in existence), the elevation of China into Public Enemy #1, firing Richard Clarke, not spending the $60bn it would take to make our ports secure, letting OBL go in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001 because resources were diverted to the unnecessary, foolish debacle that became the Iraq War?

i'd be pretty purple-faced about that.
Click to expand...

The United States did not start deploying any large
units to Kuwait for the invasion of Iraq until the summer of 2002 and nearly all of these units came from the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division a heavy division with hundreds of tanks and other heavy armored vehicles that would never be deployed to Afghanistan to chase anyone through the moutains. As of Christmas 2002, the 1st Marine MEF, a 1/3 of the initial invasion force had not even been ordered to Kuwait. One could argue that there were not enough resources in Afghanistan to begin with, but not that the invasion of Iraq caused some major diversion of recources. Out of a total of 88 Brigades that the United States has, only between 2 and 4 have ever been on the ground in Afghanistan at anyone time. Most forces sent into Iraq tend to be the heavy armor units especially during the initial invasion in 2003. The United States has not deployed any heavy armor units to Afghanistan and these were the main units involved in the initial invasion of Iraq.

Regardless of what one thinks what Bush did or did not do in the 7 months and 20 days he had before September 11, it simply does not stack up to the 8 years that Clinton had.
 
The more I watch this interview, the more I think that Clinton's outburst was mostly calculated.
 
This kind of hyperbolic, disingenuous, and inflammatory language is exactly what I have an issue with:

TracyVegas said:

. . . . a simple question is asked.
Click to expand...


What would be the "simple" answer to this question?

TracyVegas said:

refuse to ask him questions about his response (lack of response) to Bin Laden for 8 years.
Click to expand...


Disingenuous to suggest that a Republican president would have done things differently. Where was the great outcry from the right that Bin Laden must be stopped during the 90's. Oh that's right, there wasn't any.

TracyVegas said:

He must have thought he was going on CBS where Ed Bradley or some other old hack would be his lapdog for an interview and throw him softballs, and do his dirtywork for him like they did for Kerry when they were forging military documents for him.
Click to expand...


old hack, lapdog, softballs, dirty work--all snappy, inflammatory language that has become far too common in public discourse today. Oh, sure it's entertaining and you can run over your opponents this way but they're hardly reasoned arguments. In fact there is a distinct lack of facts or reason in that entire paragraph. And the forging military documents for a Kerry is a flat-out untruth.

TracyVegas said:

When Bubba's face went purple, it was not due to the simple question being posed, but rather the guilt of doing nothing for 8 years and the guilt of knowing his own inactions led to 3000 people dying needlessly, and now he tries to act as the victim and turn Wallace into the bad guy, fun to watch a habitual liar and sex offender flip out when confronted with the truth.
Click to expand...

Again where is the evidence that another president would have done much differently. And what does his being a sex offender have do with anything? And also, Clinton is not a sex offender--all the actions he was accused of with regarding Lewinsky were consensual and thus he would not have been charged with a sex crime.

This kind of nonsense is intellectual laziness at it's best (or worst).
 
NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged former President Clinton's claim that he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue al Qaeda, saying in an interview published Tuesday that the Bush administration aggressively pursued the group even before the 9/11 attacks.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post.

The newspaper published her comments after Clinton appeared on "Fox News Sunday" in a combative interview in which he defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and said he "worked hard" to have the al Qaeda leader killed. (Watch as Clinton says he tried to kill bin Laden -- 1:18)

"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Clinton said in the interview. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try; they did not try."

Rice disputed his assessment.

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false -- and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.

Rice also took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the same company that owns Fox News Channel.

In the interview, Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of a "conservative hit job" and asked: "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 people you asked, 'Why did you fire Dick Clarke?' "

Rice portrayed the departure of former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke differently, saying he "left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security."

The interview has been the focus of much attention -- drawing nearly 1.2 million views on YouTube and earning the show its best ratings in nearly three years.

Rice questioned the value of the dialogue.

"I think this is not a very fruitful discussion," she said. "We've been through it. The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock, and we know exactly what they said."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, said she saw it differently.

"I just think that my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take this," she told Newsday on Monday.
 
Again the voice of reason.

http://movies .crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment-ClintonInterview.wmv

Remove the space as usual.

The headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done, in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.
 
from today's Slatehttp://www.slate.com/id/2150335?nav=wp

[q]Bill Clinton wasn't sandbagged, because he is a smart politician. He just spent several weeks fighting ABC over its interpretation of his administration's hunt for Bin Laden. He knew the question was coming and he took advantage of it. Forty-three days before the election, he has provided a moment to rally party activists and attack the GOP at the heart of its perceived strength on handling terrorism.

Democrats should rejoice that Wallace was as tough as he was. If he had been supine, fearful of another 3,000-word report from Media Matters, the party and Clinton would have been denied an opportunity. And Clinton would have been disappointed, at least judging from his spokesperson's remarks afterward: "We're fully aware of Fox News' and Chris Wallace's agenda, and President Clinton came in prepared to respond to any attack on his record. When Wallace questioned his record on terrorism, he responded forcefully, as any Democrat would or should." In other words, he went in loaded for bear and blasted like Cheney as soon as he spotted one.

Did Clinton come across a little unhinged? Sure, but that's an advantage in a midterm election where party passion matters. Liberal activists want to see their Washington representatives fight back the way Clinton did. This was a rallying cry and a signal to other members of the party to do the same. Clinton can go to individual districts to campaign for competitive candidates, or he can sell the same message wholesale by banging the table in a single performance on Fox.

Clinton didn't just get the blood pumping among liberal activists. He made a policy critique aimed at the GOP election strategy designed to promote Republicans as the only party competent enough to handle terrorist threats. Each day people are discussing Clinton's performance or Wallace's questioning they will also be discussing which president did more to try to kill Bin Laden. Articles will revisit Bush's Aug. 6, 2001*, Presidential Daily Brief in which he was told al-Qaida was planning a major attack and to hijack planes, and producers will reinterview Richard Clarke, who says Bush dropped the ball. (Clarke's book, which is highly critical of the Bush team's pre-9/11 terror efforts, is in the top 10 on Amazon.)

The former president is also offering his wife the kind of help candidates don't usually get until they bring on their vice president. Bill can attack the right and mend fences with liberal activists, which benefits Hillary but also allows her the distance to stay above the fray.

If Bill Clinton becomes a hero of the liberal activists and liberal bloggers, it will be an extraordinary turnaround. Left-leaning bloggers who play a role in their party's politics usually savage him for triangulating and deal-making as president. Activists conjure him along with the DLC when describing policies that they consider too moderate, corporate, or otherwise insufficiently progressive. They have transferred onto his wife their suspicions about his willingness to deal away principle.

But Clinton's push-back against ABC over its 9/11 dramatization, which included unflattering fictional scenes about his administration, started his latest comeback. He even hosted a lunch with bloggers to plot strategy. The Fox interview is his second performance that not only attacks left-wing bogeymen but seeks to set the record straight against what liberals see as a tide of propaganda from the right and amnesia from the mainstream media. His attack on the "right wing" was an echo of his wife's famous complaint about the "vast right wing conspiracy" she claimed was out to get her husband during his tenure. Back then, Hillary drew attention to herself to help her husband's cause. Now, by defending himself, Bill Clinton helps hers.

[/q]
 
Wow, passion and fight from the midst of these tepid and standless Democrats. That's the first piece of excitement I've felt for a Democrat in forever. He's still the best leader the Democrats have. Bless his soul.
 
STING2 said:



Regardless of what one thinks what Bush did or did not do in the 7 months and 20 days he had before September 11, it simply does not stack up to the 8 years that Clinton had.
Click to expand...
And ofcource the 5 years after 9/11 was a great succes because they catched bin laden ?
 
Rono said:
And ofcource the 5 years after 9/11 was a great succes because they catched bin laden ?
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perhaps if Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq, there never would have been a 9-11.

but now we'll never know ... :sad:
 
U2democrat said:
:hmm:

Who was president when the twin towers came down?

Who actually flew the planes into the towers? It wasn't Bill Clinton.

Careful, babyface.
Click to expand...
And who was president during the first WTC attack?
And what did he do to prevent further attacks?
And why did he take so long to go after Osama bin Laden?
 
verte76 said:
Wow. Passion, life, drama, Clinton's got it all. He's one of a kind.
Click to expand...

and he can play the sax.

Clinton is quite popular here in the UK , no real anger towards him.

He once appeard in a corn flakes advert here lol
 
IMAO EXCLUSIVE!



Former President Bill Clinton, while getting angry at Chris Wallace for being a monkey, claimed that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the Bush Administration. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disputes this. Despite the denial, IMAO has obtained a copy of the plan. This plan was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, so it's hard to believe the Bush Administration never heard of it.

terroristmemo.jpg
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
IMAO EXCLUSIVE!



Former President Bill Clinton, while getting angry at Chris Wallace for being a monkey, claimed that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the Bush Administration. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disputes this. Despite the denial, IMAO has obtained a copy of the plan. This plan was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, so it's hard to believe the Bush Administration never heard of it.

terroristmemo.jpg
Click to expand...

As Jon Stewart said of Rice's words last night: It wasn't a plan...er...it was a set of strategies...with some action items. How can someone think that's a plan?
 
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