Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Meltdown out-takes
Premeditated?
John Dickerson in Slate:
Did Clinton come across a little unhinged?
Sure, but that's an advantage in a midterm election ...
(Said) his spokesperson ... 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."
Clinton can ... campaign for competitive candidates ... by banging the table in a single performance on Fox.
Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Read Richard Clarke's book, the former president repeatedly admonished Wallace.
... Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch donated $500,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative last week and hosted a fund-raiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton this summer.
Mangled?
Dick Morris on The Hill:
There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know ・the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation.
His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the "definition of 'is' is" could perform.
Clinton: "There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down."
Morris: "(B)in Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance."
Clinton: "I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden ... I worked hard to try to kill him."
Morris: "(Clinton) notif(ied) Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape ... (and) refuse(d) to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999."
"(T)he plan to kidnap Osama was derailed ... because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination (because of the fear that) that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy."
"In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus."
Andrew Klavan, LA Times:
(I)n (Reagan)days, my children ... the media was almost all Colmes and precious little Hannity ... you would've thought the country was being run by a miserly, warmongering idiot instead of the greatest president of the century's second half.
And yet even after his two terms were over ... I cannot remember Reagan ever "defending his legacy" with anything more than a quip and a smile.
Compare and contrast Clinton. Questioned mildly ... President Me went absolutely medieval ... leaning forward threateningly, rapping his fingers against Wallace's notes and proceeding to, well, lie ...
"And you got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever," Clinton told Wallace.
"I never thought of myself as a great man," Reagan said, "just a man committed to great ideas."
Clinton, on the other hand, is a narcissist who finds it difficult to grasp in any real sense that there is a place where his "inner man" ends and the rest of the world begins.
Ann Coulter:
The day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq.
Clinton's own campaign adviser on Iraq, Laurie Mylroie, says Clinton and his advisers are "most culpable" for the intelligence failure that allowed 9/11 to happen.
Whitewash of the day:
Deb Saunders: President Bill Clinton ... embraced his angry side ...
lol
