Wallace Sparks Clinton's Rage

Over the weekend, Chris Wallace, of FOX News Sunday, sat down with former-President Bill Clinton to talk with him about his new global initiative. Wallace, in an interview with Fishbowl DC shortly after interviewing Clinton, said that they had agreed to split the fifteen minute interview into two halves: one half dedicated to Clinton's new charity (CGI) and the other dedicated to whatever topic Wallace chose.

When Wallace asked Clinton about not doing enough to catch Osama bin Laden while in office, Clinton exploded. Wallace said later, "I felt as if a mountain was coming down in front of me." Clinton's lashing out soon made Drudge headlines--while video captures could be found all over YouTube.

Dick Morris, a former Clinton advisor, in an article published this morning in The Hill, writes about how Clinton showed America is true face: "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." Morris writes that Clinton's arguments with Wallace are based on distortions of both the questions asked and the true history.

Clinton told Wallace, “There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down.” Nobody said there was. The point of citing Somalia in the run up to 9-11 is that bin 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

Morris's past experience with the former president give him a little more credibility than your every-day op/ed columnist. Morris recalls speaking with Clinton around the time of the first WTC bombings, saying "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."

Clinton made it a point to state that President Bush had a whole 8 months to catch bin Laden after taking office--but, as Morris says, "he [Clinton] should candidly acknowledge that eight years of blame fall on him." In the interview, Clinton claims to have left the Bush Administration a clearly laid out plan for dealing with Osama; while today, Secretary of State Rice rebutted saying they were left no such thing.

Posted by MikeRubino at September 26, 2006 12:34 PM