The latest news story to spark what Americans apparently love and can’t get enough of — controversy where each side screams at the other — is the news that Bill Clinton put aside political niceties and spoke his mind on Fox News, blasting Chris Wallace and charging that he was invited on the program under false pretenses.
Crooks and Liars has the transcript here. Read it all yourself but here are some key parts of it. We are not giving these to you in the proper order so go to C&L and read it all afterwards :
WJC: 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…
CW: [laughs]
WJC: 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.
CW: But President Clinton…
WJC:
CW: We were going to ask half the question about it. I didn’t think this was going to set you off on such a tear .
WJC: It set me off on such a tear because you didn’t formulate it in an honest way and you people ask me questions you don’t ask the other side.
Clinton rattles off a bunch of questions he has been asked about 911 and terrorism that he says Fox News hasn’t asked Bush administration officials yet. And Wallace’s answers indicate that, in fact, they haven’t asked them yet.
Here’s another part:
CW: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?
WJC: 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 falsely based on the 911 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.
And on Karl Rove:
CW: So what is the BS?
WJC: well every even number year right before an election they come up with some security issue. In 2000 right before the election …In 2002 our party supported them in undertaking weapon inspections in Iraq and were 100% behind them in Afghanistan and they didn’t have any way to make us look like we didn’t care about terror. And so they decided they would…the homeland security bill that they opposed and they put some pill in it that we wouldn’t pass like taking the job rights away from 170,000 people and then say that we were weak on terror if we weren’t for it… This year I think they wanted to make the question of prisoner treatment and intercepted communications the same sort of issue until John Warner came and Lindsey Graham got in there and it turns out there were some Republicans who believe in the Constitution and their convictions…some ideas about how best to fight terror.
As long as the American people believe that we take this seriously and we may have our differences over Iraq but I think we’ll do fine this election. Even if they agree with us about the Iraq war we could be hurt by Karl Rove’s new foray if we don’t make it clear that we care about the security of this country. We want to implement the 9/11 commission rec which they haven’t in four years. We want to…Afghanistan against bin laden. We want to make America more energy independent. If they want to talk about Iraq say what they really want about Iraq.
But Rove is good and why I honor him…I’ve always been amused by how good he is. But on the other hand this is perfectly predictable. We’re going to win a lot of seats if the American people aren’t afraid. If they’re afraid and we get divided again then we’ll only win a few seats.
Read the whole thing.
The video is here:
OUR THOUGHTS:
(1) If you read the tenor of Wallace’s comments, it sounds like he’s essentially doing a commercial to validate the recent highly controversial “Road To 911” film. Reporters generally don’t follow marching orders from political parties (sorry, to you bloggers on the left and right who believe Fox News and the New York Times get emails with assignments for the day but it doesn’t work that way). But reporters may reflect the corporate cultures within which they work, or the perspective of the group of reporters and editors with whom they work and/or socialize.
Wallace is clearly operating from a not-unusual perspective: the Fox News perspective…which is to view things from a GOP political anchor. And Clinton challenges him on every question, every assumption behind his question, essentially pointing out where Wallace and Fox News seem to be coming from.
(2) Blog comments on the left and right are predictable based on the ideology of the blog. What’s most notable is the near-obsession many conservatives continue to have with Bill Clinton.Conservatives complain about Bush bashing and Bush hating on the left but this is a reminder that they have indulged in the same, exact kind of bitter hatred for years. They also go after Clinton but do it in a way that tries to paint the behavior and decisions of the Bush administration on terrorism in the days and months up to 911 as somehow pristine. That was not the case.
It’s sad that truth and balance have become so scarce in 21st century political debate, where the goal now is to constantly “get” the other side and play defense lawyer and p.r. firm for your side. If this is where we are and how it’s trending at the beginning of this century, think of where we’ll be 20 years hence.
You can read some comments on various weblogs comments by going here.
Here are two notable weblogs that reflect independent thinking. Read them in full but we’ll give you sizable excerpts since the writers did more than react based on who they might or might not have voted for in the past:
Ed Morrissey:
We can argue for years about how much he tried, and for what reasons. In fact, we have — for five years — and it’s time to give it a rest.
The rise of Islamofascism didn’t occur just on Clinton’s watch, and his presidency was not the only one that demonstrated weakness and fecklessness to the jihadists. One can (and should) pick out examples from the three preceding administrations. Jimmy Carter undermined the Shah and allowed Ruhollah Khomeini to seize power in Iran, and then did nothing but demonstrate impotency when Khomeini had our embassy in Teheran seized — allowing the crisis to drag on for 444 days as Khomeini’s followers held 51 Americans hostage. Ronald Reagan retreated from Lebanon after a Hezbollah attack killed hundreds of Marines, and then negotiated with them when they took hostages. George Bush kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait but let him off the hook with the road to Baghdad open because he didn’t want to alienate the moderate Arab regimes that had given tacit support to the invasion.
Clinton added to the list, of course. He failed to follow up on the Iraqi ties to the first World Trade Center bombing. He did little after the Khobar Towers attack. The twin bombings of the African embassies, an early hallmark of al-Qaeda’s coordination of attacks, resulted in a missile attack on a training camp that barely missed Osama bin Laden. Given intel that a Sudanese aspirin factory had produced chemical weapons, later found questionable, Clinton attacked it with missiles to neutralize the threat. He failed to respond to the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole — but neither did the Bush administration that replaced him.
Nor can we argue that the Bush administration took much action in the preceding months to guard against the threat from AQ, although they gave it about the same level of attention as the Clinton administration did, and mostly with the same players.
I am reminded by this video and accompanying commentary why I stopped calling myself a conservative some years ago.
Finger-pointing, retroactive blaming like this is really quite demeaning to the Presidency and to the country. President Clinton has a right to be offended. I’m offended for him. Hindsight isn’t really 20/20, it just looks that way. Blaming him for not getting Bin Laden is as ghastly stupid and nasty as blaming Bush for sitting in that classroom for a few minutes continuing to read “My Pet Goat” (or whatever it was called) with the kids while he contemplated what to do. Or slamming Bush for failing to get Bin Laden to date.
I would remind my Republican pals that we need to focus on the common enemy, not engage in retroactive finger-pointing.
But, in the end, Fox News gets what it wanted.
A piece of “hot tape” — a controversy. To get people fired up. Angry. To tune in.
It’s the way American politics works nowadays — except in elections the goal is to get the base of parties fired up. And angry. To go to the polls.
In other words, serious, thoughtful discussion to find out where things aren’t going well or didn’t work so flaws and policies can be corrected is trivial compared to generating anger to get people off their butts to get to their remotes to watch your station, to get to the polls to vote for your candidate, or to go your website to see angry words denouncing candidate X, Y, an entire party (or other people who write weblogs with differing views).
The 2006 election is less than two months away…and 2008 is a little more than two years away….Think of all the controversies yet to come…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.