Don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. He might even demolish your bogus Bush-tough-on-terror narrative. And that would be bad.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?
(...)
[T]he 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.
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.
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.
My prediction is that they air the question in full, and cut Clinton's response to shreds to make him sound petulant and ineffectual (i.e., maybe just leaving in the parts where he talks about Wallace's smirk, and about how he "tried" to get bin Laden and failed). Hopefully the fact that Think Progress obtained a leaked transcript will make them think twice about it, but I don't think they'll care - they wear their journalistic dishonesty like a badge of honor.
(hat tip to RevDeb in FDL comments)
4 comments:
Damn.
I love that he referred to Wallace's "smirk" cause he is a smarmy little prick.
Sigh... The difference between Clinton and Bush (regardless of their politics) is so clear to us 'stupid fag commie' foreigners. Will you guys for fuck's sake please get rid of this current batch of criminals and replace them with some honest 'lesbo-sodomite-islamofascists'?
[Sorry about that: I have a general rule about not complaining on Americans' blogs about American politics, and I've just broken it. But since I'm in the process: The fact that most Americans don't seem to get what a joke Bush appears to be in the rest of the democratic world only serves to make all of America itself into a joke. Hell, I'm Canadian and I'm none too fond of frequent European snottiness myself. But I agree with them on this: a pre-requisite for being leader of the country is intelligence. Clinton exudes it. Bush is it's antithesis. Clinton confidently confronts his adversaries, Bush doesn't even try to pretend that he understands anything. I could go on, but I won't. Eli, please accept my apologies for this.]
My prediction is that they air the question in full, and cut Clinton's response to shreds to make him sound petulant and ineffectual
No question. You could almost plan a drinking game -- Dr. Pepper for you -- around which sentences they leave out.
No need to apologize, Kyklops - I agree with every word. Somehow we got away from the concept of "The president should be scary smart and ultra-competent" to "The president should be a reg'lar guy, just like me (and yet, at the same time, an infallible god-being)."
Sigh.
Flory will need to bring a whole bunch o' Dr Pepper...
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