Bill Clinton vs Fair & Balanced

Okay, The Man Cub got me up at 4 am, as usual, so I’ve had time to check out Clinton’s interview on Fox yesterday.

First off, let me just say that Chris Wallace is one smug, preening little prick. Seriously, I did not know they stacked shit that high, even at Fox News.

And to be fair, Clinton let him get his dander up. At times, I thought he was gonna hop up off his chair and squash that little Fox News fucker like the insect he is.

Wallace even pulled the same craven trick to pose the question that set Clinton off as the Pope did in his mea culpa about writing off Islam – it wasn’t his words, it was somebody else’s and he was just the hapless go-between. Wallace began by saying that Fox News fans emailed him overwhelmingly with one question for Clinton: Why didn’t he do more to catch bin Laden when he was President?

[Allow me to digress about the Pope thing – he made a big speech containing an earlier Pope’s blanket condemnation of Islam, and as soon as the lunatic fringe of that religion pointed out that the Vatican would make a dandy terror target, he’s been retracting his words daily since then, claiming “those weren’t my words, I was just repeating them!” What a load of horseshit. You don’t quote someone in the middle of a major speech unless you agree with them or are setting up a rebuttal. And this rebuttal didn’t come till after the Pope had placed the Vatican treasures in the cross-hairs of Muslim extremists. That shows you what the Vatican really values – its possessions.]

Whenever Clinton talked about the comprehensive anti-terror plan he bequeathed to the Bush administration – which they completely ignored till 9/11, just like they did the Israeli/Palestinian peace process because they saw it was a political loser for Clinton – Wallace smarmily asserted that all he [Wallace] wanted to talk about was Clinton’s current Global Something Initiative. It was a repeated, smirking display of hubris worthy of the current President himself.

Whenever Clinton talked about Richard Clarke’s allegations against the Bush administration – Clarke, who had served under two Republican presidents before Clinton and wasn’t kicked to the curb till he began to blow the whistle on W’s anti-terror inaction pre-9/11 – once again, all Wallace wanted to talk about was Clinton’s new Initiative.

Clinton also made an excellent point (admittedly repeatedly, as is his wont) that the very neocon geniuses who egged W into invading Iraq were the same bastards who criticized the Clinton administration’s anti-terror efforts as “wag the dog” tactics to distract the public’s attention from the shitstorm of empty investigations they spent the 90s throwing at him. Turns out now that the partisan investigations were tactics to distract the President from doing his job, not vice versa.

No wonder Clinton was pissed. Every American should be.