TEARING CLINTON'S LIES TO SHRED

The Bush Administration sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the New York Post to meet with editors and reporters. The mission: shoot down every one of Bill Clinton's lies that the former president told on Fox News Sunday. Secretary Rice made several rebuttals.

In response to Clinton's claim that the Bush Administration did nothing to try and get Bin Laden, Rice shot back: "The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false and I think the 9/11 commission understood that. What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years." OK .. so now we have two sides to THAT story. Who to believe? The man disbarred from the practice of law because of perjury, or Condi Rice?

As for Bill Clinton's statement that he left behind a comprehensive terror strategy, that too was exposed as a lie. "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda." She would know. And what about Bill Clinton's statement that George W. Bush demoted Richard Clarke...the country's best guy on terrorism? Rice shot that down, too: "Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some several months later." So there you have it.

Just as predicted, Bill Clinton may have looked all big and bad when he huffed and puffed on TV in front of Chris Wallace. But in doing so, he invited scrutiny...and his statements simply are not holding up.

It's nice to see the Bush Administration isn't taking Clinton's history revisionism lying down.

DEOMOCRATS UNLEASH REID, PELOSI, DEAN

There aren’t many press releases sent out on weekends as a rule. This Sunday was different, with the ‘Three-headed Democratic Monster’ each, issuing, statements. Here’s a taste of Harry Reid’s statement:

“Once again, the American people have learned that the Bush Administration has not been honest with them about the war in Iraq. Press reports say our nation’s intelligence services have confirmed that President Bush’s repeated missteps in Iraq and his stubborn refusal to change course have made America less safe. No election-year White House PR campaign can hide this truth. It is crystal clear that America’s security demands we change course in Iraq. The war in Iraq is now in its fourth year and Congress has yet to ask the tough questions and get the honest answers our nation’s security demands. Tomorrow, that will change. With the Democratic Policy Committee’s hearings into the conduct of the war in Iraq, we will finally take America in a new direction.”

Democrats insist that this NIE proves their case that the Bush administration’s policies have made us less safe than we should be but how credible is this information? Let’s consider that the NIE is a classified document, meaning that someone with an anti-Bush agenda leaked this information. It’s worth remembering another leak of NIE information claiming that the Bush administration cherry-picked intelligence to lie us into war. When that NIE was declassified, it was clear that the leaker was the one who cherry-picked the information.

Let’s next look at Reid’s statement that “It is crystal clear that America’s security demands we change course in Iraq.” Why is it “crystal clear” that present Bush administration policy must be changed to protect America? The fact that we’ve gone 5 years without getting attacked again by terrorists? Or has America’s being in Iraq prevented us from aggressively interrogating AQ terrorists which thwarted other terrorist attacks?

That’s all the attention that that statement deserves. Let’s next look at Pelosi’s brief statement:

“The news report on the National Intelligence Estimate is further proof that the war in Iraq is making it harder for America to fight and win the war on terror. Five years after 9/11 and Osama bin Laden is still free and not a single terrorist who planned 9/11 has been caught and brought to justice. President Bush should read the intelligence carefully before giving another misleading speech about progress in the war on terrorism.”

Let’s first establish that this wasn’t just a news report about the NIE; it was a leak by someone with an anti-Bush agenda. That alone should call into question the leak’s veracity. Second of all, Pelosi’s statement that President Bush “should read the intelligence carefully” won’t fly with the American people, who’ve known from the first days after 9/11 that President Bush has, to appropriate a Clinton phrase, focused like a laser beam on stopping all other terrorist attacks. In fact, most Americans recognized long ago that President Bush, Joe Lieberman and the Republican Party are the only ones who’ve been serious about fighting the GWOT.

Finally, Ms. Pelosi’s lamenting that Khaled Sheikh Muhammed hasn’t been brought to trial is disingenuous. She’s aware that the CIA has been interrogating KSM all this time, with the CIA getting alot of information from those interrogations. This gives Ms. Pelosi a choice: Would Ms. Pelosi rather get additional information that prevents additional terrorist attacks or would she rather have sped KSM into a trial, after which his information would have likely remained secret.

Now let’s look at Gov. Dean’s statement:

“President Clinton did exactly what Democrats need to do in this election. Democrats need to stand up to the right-wing propaganda machine and tell the truth. Washington Republicans’ attempts to twist history and recast the truth do not help us win the war on terror or bring us closer to capturing Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. President Clinton stood up to the misleading tactics of the right-wing propaganda machine. As the NIE that was reported on today showed, the Iraq War and the Bush Administration’s failed policies have hurt our ability to win the war on terror. As President Clinton said, Democrats stand for policies that are both tough and smart and we remain committed to winning the war on terror.”

All that Clinton did was go ballistic on Chris Wallace because his track record on fighting terrorism was lackluster at best. Dean doesn’t do his party any favors by calling Chris Wallace, a very fair-minded journalist, part of “the right-wing propaganda machine…” That simply won’t fly with most people. Obviously, it’ll excite the Moonbat Kos Kidz but it won’t bring new voters into the Democratic Party, something that they’re badly in need of.

CLINTON RAGE; THE MORNING AFTER

By Michelle Malkin ·

Photoshop by David Lunde

On Fox and Friends this morning, Chris Wallace had some interesting comments about his interview with the Finger-Jabber:

His reaction to Clinton accusing him of having a "smirk:"

"What it was was sheer wonder at what I was witnessing."

Heh. On what happened after the interview:

"There was no making up with him. He was angry. And when he left, he chewed out his staff."

The Finger-Jabber. Always, always blaming someone else for his failures.

Noel Sheppard at The American Thinker weighs in on "Bill Clinton, Bin Laden, and Hysterical Revisions." Howard Kurtz does a brief take on Clinton's finger-wagging moment.

Our take on Slick Willie's Day of Rage is here.

Scott Johnson at Power Line:

The most striking feature of Bill Clinton's bloviations on FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace yesterday was the incredibly low ratio of facts to whoppers. If Chris Wallace could prompt that red-faced response with such an innocuous question, I wonder if a few minutes with Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden, interviewed by NRO here), might not send him to intensive care. I would love to hear Miniter ask Clinton a few questions about Clinton's treatment of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center -- an attack that Clinton shrugged off in a few paragraphs of his subsequent Saturday morning radio talk, never to return to the subject. (Miniter quotes the relevant paragraphs of the radio address at pages 28-30 of his book.)

Ronald Cass at RCP minces no words:

Presidents often find it hard to leave the stage. The day of Bush's first inauguration, Clinton lingered for hours at Andrews Air Force base trying to hang on to the attention he had so enjoyed as President. He still seeks the limelight.

But desperation to be noticed after leaving office, to have the respect and affection Clinton craves, isn't a substitute for doing the right thing when in office - any more than lies are a substitute for honesty, or indecision a suitable alternative to moral courage.

On the golf course, Bill Clinton is known for his dislike of playing his ball where it lies, scoring honestly, and taking his lumps as the rest of us duffers must. He makes his own score, always a good deal better than the real number.

Someone else should be trusted to do the scoring when it comes to Clinton's time in office. In the history books, he deserves to be counted as the President who did not protect us against al-Qaeda, who left the impression they could attack us without penalty, whose wasted opportunities contributed to the travesty of 9/11.

Tough talk now should not be allowed to obscure that fact. Lies now should not go unanswered.

***
Previous: He doth protest too much

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.

DON'T BUY GAS FROM THIS ASS; BOYCOTT CITGO

By Michelle Malkin ·

Tons of readers are asking me for information about boycotting CITGO to protest sulfur-sniffing Hugo Chavez. Movement growing here and here. More here and here.

Jim Hoft notes that CITGO held a Chavez pep rally in Harlem. Fox News reports:

Chavez, dressed in his signature red shirt, was introduced at the podium by activist actor Danny Glover.

At one point Chavez told the crowd, "sometimes the devil takes human form," a comment that drew some boos — and applause — from the crowd who interpreted the reference to mean President Bush.

Chavez was visiting the church as part of ceremonies to announce the sale of discounted home heating oil to qualified low-income families.

The appearance came after reports circulated early Thursday morning that the Venezuelan president had left the country overnight after delivering an insult-riddled speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday in which he called President Bush the 'devil.'

The crowd chanted "Chavez, Chavez, the people are with you" in Spanish as he walked into the Mount Olivet Baptist Church on Lenox Ave. in Harlem.

The event, one of a series designed to boost the Venezuelan leader's popularity in the U.S., was organized by Citgo, a Houston-based energy company that is owned and controlled by the Venezuelan government. Under a Citgo program, and in partnership with Citizens Energy, a program started and run by former Congressman Joe Kennedy II, families from low-income neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia have the ability to purchase discounted home heating oil over winter months.

Venezuelan officials and Citgo employees handed out T-shirts prior to the event with the name of the program — "From The Venezuelan Heart To The U.S. Hearths" — printed across the front.

WHY DO WE PUT UP WITH THIS

Yesterday the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez took to the podium at the United Nations and spoke to the General Assembly. In his speech, he slammed President Bush, calling him "The Devil" and talked about the Noam Chomsky book he's been reading. That should be enough to tell you everything this crazy leftist stands for...but there was more to the story.

Sounding like he was reading a script prepared by the Democrat Party and Moveon.org, Chavez ranted on and on about how the United States was an imperialist nation that didn't really want peace. He criticized Bush for thinking he owned the world and called him an imperialist, fascist and an assassin. Not much of a surprise. But in making his remarks, Chavez made Bush's point.

One by one, these supposedly elected tinhorn dictators are making the Bush Administration's point. Hugo Chavez is an America-hating socialist that cavorts with the world's thugs. He is an enemy of the United States, just like the president of Iran is. He would be saying what he is saying no matter who was in charge in the Oval Office. He hates George W. Bush because Bush doesn't give people like himself much wiggle room.

By the way, anyone notice the lack of response from the Democrats on these speeches by Chavez and the president of Iran? Do they agree with what they're saying? How about it, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton? Are you going to not disagree with these crazies? It sure seems to be the case. Wouldn't you think that when some foreign footstool calls our president the "devil" that at least some of the loyal opposition would have something to say? Evidently not.

Why do we have to put up with this? Why do we have to open our arms to voids surrounded by a sphincter muscle like Hugo Chavez; allowing them to come to this country to demean our institutions? Why? The United nations, that's why.

but then .. Chavez had one fabulous idea in all of his rantings. He proposed moving the United Nations to Venezuela. That is a fabulous idea....get the whole sham of an organization completely out of here. He can have it.