What Might’ve Been

Posted on by Chad Orzel

Since everybody else left of Limbaugh is linking it, I might as well throw in a pointer to the Fox interview with Bill Clinton, where he lights into Chris Wallace for asking him about Osama bin Laden:

CLINTON: What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.

Now, I’ve never criticized President Bush, and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq.

And you ask me about terror and Al Qaida with that sort of dismissive thing? When all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive, systematic way to try to protect the country against terror.

And you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so clever. But I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it. But I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could.

The entire military was against sending Special Forces in to Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter. And no one thought we could do it otherwise, because we could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaida was responsible while I was president.

And so, I left office. And yet, I get asked about this all the time. They had three times as much time to deal with it, and nobody ever asks them about it. I think that’s strange.

God, he’s good. Even when he loses his temper, he’s good.

I knew we were taking a step down after the 2000 election, but I had no idea how big the step was.

Posted in War

7 thoughts on “What Might’ve Been”

  1. But, as Jon Stewart pointed out last night, does the information he delivered in that (mostly) controlled outburst get significant coverage? Noooo…it’s the outburst that gets coverage, not how important what he’s saying is. GMA yesterday let Bill O’Reilly basically monologue for several minutes on the subject yesterday morning as a “response.” It was the last straw…I’m not watching GMA anymore.

  2. I particularly liked the “moment of zen” last night on the Daily Show. Showing Chris Wallace’s question to Clinton and then Katie Couric (?) asking Condoleezza Rice “How does someone ask the Secretary of State on a date?”

    Oh, yeah, we’ve got a SERIOUS liberal media conspiracy here… sheesh.

  3. You know, in terms of sheer political talent, most people are a step down from Bill Clinton. I grew up in Arkansas (and went to college with Roger Clinton), so I got to see him develop into the formidable infighter he is today.

    But political talent isn’t everything. A great number of Clinton’s assertions during his Wallace interview are questionable, and several key ones are just wrong. The egregious ones are mostly the blame-the-other-side lines, naturally. Example: the pressure to get out of Somalia wasn’t from the right so much as it was from Robert Byrd. And the objections to the Afghanistan cruise-missle attack weren’t so much from the right either.

    There’s nothing unusual about this – every politician knows, and has known for at least a couple of thousand years, to deal with awkward questions with a tu quoque defense. Clinton’s very good at it. But being slicker and faster with rhetoric, fun as it can be to watch, isn’t as high on my list as some other qualities.

    Ay, here I am with a non-politics blog, commenting on someone else’s non-politics blog about Bill Clinton.

  4. The egregious ones are mostly the blame-the-other-side lines, naturally. Example: the pressure to get out of Somalia wasn’t from the right so much as it was from Robert Byrd. And the objections to the Afghanistan cruise-missle attack weren’t so much from the right either.

    I don’t think he was claiming that all of the pressure to get out was from the right, but rather that the specific people who are currently saying he didn’t do enough then opposed what he did as excessive at the time.

    But I don’t really want this to be a Clinton-blogging day– lots of physics stuff is in the queue, and I need to go do some work in the shop.

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