Bill Clinton Wigs Out

I think that the scrutiny directed at the Clinton Administration resulting from the ABC mini-series "The Path To 9-11" has struck a nerve.  The former President must be feeling desperate if he is willing to outwardly admit failure in order to press his case that he at least "tried" to get Osama Bin Laden.  Based upon his comments, he must believe in the same vast right-wing conspiracy that his wife does. 

 

The thing is, his Administration's open bungling of opportunities to inflict significant damage to Al Qaeda is chronicled in documents like the official 9-11 report -- hardly a compendium of right-wing talking points.  The former President's outburst, along with his comment that he is "sick of Karl Rove's bull#*%&" reveal a surging anger and frustration within both President Clinton and the Democratic Party.

 

Update:  Sure it's fun to watch Bill Clinton freak out and wag his finger ala, "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." However, Ed Morrissey has written what I consider to be a very fair post in which he argues that there is enough blame to go around for the failure to recognize that the jihadists had declared war against the United States and that a firm response was needed.  From his post:

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.

Read the whole thing.  Ed's bottom line, and rightly so, is that we should be focusing our national priorities on protecting Americans instead of applying endless blame.  Great contribution Ed! 

Update:  I just watched the entire Clinton interview.  The snippet released earlier in the week doesn't do justice to just how upset and animated the former President was.  His reaction struck me as out of proportion to the line of questioning. 

The two things that became very apparent to me were, first of all, his desire to elevate Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies as the version of events the former President finds most legitimate.  At one point he even referred to the official 9-11 Report as a "political document."  I didn't get the impression that he believes the entire report was bogus, but he obviously has disagreements with some of it's contents.  His preference is the Clarke book because is obviously paints his efforts in a better light.

Secondly, he made a concerted effort to frame any criticisms directed toward his administration as being part of a right-wing and Fox News cabal.  This was classic Bill Clinton, marshalling moral outrage to try and paint himself as an unfair victim while attacking his attackers.  Personally, I thought that he was rather rude to Chris Wallace, who was simply trying to ask him what I took to be legitimate questions.  He could have answered them calmly, but instead either lost his temper or "chose" to lose his temper to throw Wallace on the defensive and better control the interview.  The former President's body language was very aggressive and I thought that, at times, he came across as smug and condescending -- like he believed the interview was a set-up but he was too smart to be caught unawares.

 

Something else to consider.  Could the former President have agreed to the interview knowing that he was likely to be asked about his efforts to get Bin Laden?  He is a very shrewd politician, and the fact that he agreed to a first-time appearance on Fox News Sunday after the airing of "The Path To 9-11" makes for interesting timing.  If the aforementioned is true, then it is possible that he intended to use the forum to bash "right-wingers" in general and Fox News in particular -- both despised by the left-wing of the Democratic Party -- in order to help the prospective presidential candidacy of his wife.  

 

Update:  Hugh Hewitt blogs on the interview here.