BILL CLINTON UNHINGED

RCP just posted a rough transcript of Bill Clinton’s interview on FNS. It isn’t pretty. Let’s take a peek at the most noteworthy exchanges:

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 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.”

As LFR’s owner, I’m offering the first person to tell me when a Republican accused President Clinton of being obsessed with bin Laden a mystery prize of incredible worth. I’ve paid a fair amount of attention to Clinton and I’ve never heard anyone say he was obsessed with bin Laden while he was president. There isn’t a Republican that didn’t accuse him of having an obsession but it wasn’t about bin Laden.

“They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in Black Hawk Down and I refused to do it and stayed 6 months and had an orderly transfer to the UN.”

As I’ve talked about before, the ‘they’ he’s refering to is John Murtha. The last I looked, John Murtha wasn’t a member of the VWRC.

CLINTON: …If you can criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this, after the Cole I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full scale attack search for Bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan which we got after 9/11.

President Clinton, Why didn’t you have these plans drawn up after the Embassy Bombings? Why did you wait until a month before the 2000 election to draw up plans to invade Afghanistan and destroy al Qaida? Waiting 2+ years to figure out if we could take out al Qaida isn’t how I’d do it if he were my top foreign policy priority.

CLINTON: …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..

Clinton is still the sniping, undignified person he always was and always will be. He’s also fast becoming a card-carrying member of the ‘Unhinged Left’. Chris Wallace isn’t a partisan pundit. He’s a pretty level-headed reporter. I’d defy anyone to prove that he’s a conservative or liberal based on how he interviews people.

I suspect that Clinton’s rant is partially motivated by his anger at having his foreign policy failures exposed and partially to make his tirade the Monday morning story, not his failure to capture bin Laden.

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…

This interview is a great example of why we don’t miss Bill Clinton. He’s a boor and he’s vindictive. He was well-suited for the 90’s but I’m glad that President Bush is Commander-in-Chief right now.