Clinton Blasts FOXNEWS Attempted Smearjob! See FOXNEWS Sunday

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Prakosh

Senior Member
Clinton Takes On Fox News

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.

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.

Full Transcript
 
Faux News is in full damage-control spin this a.m.

Its unprecendented. I've had it turned on, and Fox has spent much of the two hours preceding the clinton interview, bringing on their Fox "experts" to rebut the facts clinton presents in his interview. Before the Clinton interview even airs.

I've never seen anything like this. Certainly, NBC doesn't spend two hours prior to Russert's Meet the Press, interviewing "experts" to rebut the claims of a republican Russert interviews.
 
Funny stuff, someone finally asks Clinton a real question and Clinton loses it.........Poor thing, gets a reporter who ask questions rather than sucking up to him. And Clinton can't handle it. They need to play this over and over again. I just saw it on CNN and even they said Cliinton looked bad.
 
Clinton's excuse, the military the CIA, the congress, the FBI, no one would let him get Osama when he wanted to!! LOL Man what a fool.
 
remember last time Clinton was irate and accusing a right wing conspiracy and waving his finger around............when he said "I did not have sex with that woman!" LOL
 
Yes, I remember when Clinton was "irate" on TV before. Usually it covers up something embarrassing he doesn't want to admit...
 
Of course, Bush simply stutters and says something funny when he is trying to do the same. Clinton is far more elequent in his...
 
The fact remains that the Bush administration diverted intelligence assets that had been looking for Osama from the Clinton days long before 9/11. If Bush had been as diligent as Clinton, he might have gotten him even before 9/11...and if he had been in the Oval Office doing his fucking job instead of taking the longest vacation in presidential history a mere seven months after taking the job, he might have been able to shake the tree and find OUT about the memo from the FBI field officer about arabs learning to fly planes but not caring to learn how to land them....

There is no doubt that had 9/11 happened on Clinton's watch, he sure as hell would not have trumped up the fake case against Saddam and invaded Iraq...that is for damned sure.
 
Maineman sounds like Clinton, throws a bunch of lies around and completely ignores the question asked. Typical lib
 
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/24/clinton-video/

Clinton was awesome, he held his own, and I learned a GREAT deal from what he explained and said.

I don't think he "lost" it.... he did not go off topic, he was focussed in his answers and he did not flinch at the accusations of Wallace....he got his answers stated which FOX is KNOWN for not letting the person being interviewed, time to answer. (that is if it is a dem they never give time, but if it is a repug they give them all the time in the world)
 
I think they both handled it rather well, to tell the truth, it didn't appear as if they were enemies in their disagreement.
 
I thought that too Damo, I think Wallace did well also.

Some people are saying that wallace got snuffed but to me, he was a gentleman and showed restraint and handled himself as a journalist should, professionally.
 
but the question is, Is why didn't the Bush administration go after those that did the uss Cole HIT? In January 01 it was certified that Bin Laden was behind it....why did the Bush administration ignore the intelligence assessment of the previous administration? EGO? ARROGANCE?

who knows....but september 11th might not have happened if they did go after them....you just don't know if they had bombed and disrupted them in Afghanistan if they could not have stopped the progress of the attack...?
 
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