Bill Clinton Sets Fox News Straight
September 26, 2006 – 12:26 amYou may have already seen this, but if not, I strongly encourage you to spend sixteen minutes of your day watching this interview with President Bill Clinton that aired on the Fox News Channel on Sunday:
I particularly recommend watching around the 11:48 mark, when President Clinton is talking about his efforts to kill Osama Bin Laden:
What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized the finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody’s gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than twenty thousand troops there trying to kill him. Now, I’ve never criticized President Bush, and I don’t think this is useful, but you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda…
Bravo, good sir. Bravo. First, can you imagine what it must have been like to have a president that could form complete sentences without the help of a speechwriter? It’s only been six years, and I can barely remember that luxury.
Second, President Clinton is saying here what honest people have been thinking for quite some time. The buck for September 11 doesn’t stop with President Clinton. The former president definitely played a role in these events, but only one man occupied the office of President of the United States of America when those attacks took place. Only one president was briefed by the outgoing administration on the worsening threat posed by Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda operation and proceeded to sit on that report. Only one president has consistently preferred the political sycophant to the properly qualified candidate when it comes to making key executive appointments.
This president, President George W. Bush, is the one who should be sitting down with the news media recounting all the mistakes he’s made in his war on terror, urging congressional investigators to make public their objective findings. Somehow, President Clinton is the only one honest enough to offer up his mistakes for open public debate. President Bush would prefer to hide behind the Fox News Channel, ABC, and the rest of the mainstream media who are willing to do his bidding and propagate a directed and deliberate misinformation campaign upon the American people weeks before the midterm elections.
If you watch the whole video, you may take some interest in President Clinton’s discussion of Somalia circa 1993. If so, I strongly urge you to read this piece from Glenn Greenwald explaining the degree to which Fox News’ claims are the hallmark of historical revisionism. The levels of dishonesty and malice shown by Fox News and their cohorts is truly sickening.
3 Responses to “Bill Clinton Sets Fox News Straight”
I watched an edit of this interview on the (Fox) 10:00 news a couple nights ago. Even knowing it would be the least flattering edit possible, I was impressed seeing the whole thing.
By Dixie on Sep 27, 2006 at 10:49 am
I was a bit surprised, because it was uncommonly aggressive on President Clinton’s part, which of course was in part what earned him such rebuke from his political opponents over it. But, that is one of the beauties of having retired from politics: you can say what you really think and not care how it will be reflected in the next day’s opinion polls.
I think ultimately that style is the best way to confront those who are so willing to rewrite history. It was nice to not only see the president attack the erroneous claims within each question but then to go that one step further and openly attack the motives with which the questions were being asked.
I just got the impression that President Clinton was fed up with that nonsense, having heard too many times from too many people who obviously have a tenuous, if any, grasp of the facts. It does get old in a hurry.
By jjk on Sep 27, 2006 at 10:59 am
It was interesting that he confronted the interviewer so openly. There are these things we think are obvious (Fox is a right wing news network, the interviewers are biased, the questions are framed with bias, etc), but are never really said in public except in forums where everyone agrees with everyone else.
To see someone say “You ask me different kinds of questions than you ask of your allies,” and get a reply of “We’re perfectly fair and balanced,” was a rare display of this disconnect between what people say and what they’re actually doing.
The sad thing is that even though this is being touted as a huge victory for the left, it’s probably not going to change much. People who agree with Clinton will go out of their way to watch the entire thing and say, “Yeah, you go!” People who don’t care, or who agree with the right wingers will see the edited versions (which portray Clinton as a frustrated failure of a man flying off the handle when confronted with his errors) and continue with the right wing revisionist conclusions.
By Dixie on Sep 27, 2006 at 12:27 pm