I Tried And I Failed

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Having had to work late last night I found it quite funny to wake up and see this video all over the web:

Now that is some funny stuff. Kinda reminds me of:

When he said “they had 8 months to try, they did not try” I almost choked on my Pepsi. This is the face of someone scared to death his legacy is crumbling around him. 8 months!

Actually it comes close to 6 months since it took Bush a few months to get everything straightened out and the furniture back after the Clinton lackeys vandalized everything like the little schoolkids that side of the fence are.

Then he has the gall to say rightwingers OPPOSED his efforts to get Osama. What a crock.

Rewind tape!

“Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan,” Clinton told the Long Island Association on Feb. 15, 2002.

“He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again.

“They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

“So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn’t and that’s how he wound up in Afghanistan.”

Sure, we question the timing of that missile into an empty tent and the halfhearted way of attacking him but to allege that we did not want Clinton to get Osama at all is simply rewriting history for his own benefit. As Ace said, he simply lies:

The man simply lies. It is a breathtakingly stupid and mendacious claim that rightwingers, as he calls us, actually opposed his weak single effort to get bin Ladin. Throughout the late nineties, I was apopleptic we weren’t doing anything at all about bin Ladin. We wanted more action. Not less.

The pretext for this lie is that rightwingers, myself included, did in fact “question the timing” of his one attempt to kill bin Ladin. It occurred, coindentally enough, during the Lewinsky furor. On the eve of some testimony; can’t remember which, and it really doesn’t matter.

Conservatives did not object to this attack. We were enraged, however, that the man refused to attack bin Ladin at all until he was motivated to action by a threat to his own political safety. We were not angry he’d attacked bin Ladin; we were angry he hadn’t attacked bin Ladin before (or after, actually; anyone remember a subsequent attack?).

We were angry that the man had let bin Ladin attack us with impunity for years until he saw it as a good move politically to finally launch a poorly-timed cruise missile at bin Ladin. He was animated to action not to save American lives, but to save his own fucking political life.

When you look up politician in the Encyclopedia there should be a picture of this man. He is the picture perfect politician. A man who will do anything, do anybody, to be politically successful. If it didn’t effect him he could care less about it. Polls down? Find out why and say the opposite.

The exact opposite of Bush. Bush could care less about the polls, and his political career. He cares about doing the right thing, polls be damned. A hundred years from now people will look at Clinton as just another politician but will look at Bush as someone with a backbone, politician second.

At the end of that teaser we hear Clinton say “I tried, so I tried and failed!”

Imagine for a second if Bush had said that, there would be HUGE headlines that said “I FAILED!”

Instead we get the lefty papers ignoring it while the lefty blogs all atwitter that Clinton got his panties in a bunch.

Yes you failed Mr. Clinton. You failed repeatedly for 8 years. This is why your Presidency will go down as a failure. You let us down and for that we all should be ashamed that we elected you to that chair.

UPDATE 9-24-06

So the video is out:

Whole transcript is here.

And all I have to say is wow! How in the hell did this guy ever get elected? He lies so much I tend to think they have become his reality. I mean he tries to say that he did the right thing by waiting a few days to cut and run from Somalia, that the whole military didn’t want to send troops in to get Osama….so it wasn’t his fault. And the most galling lie, that Republicans had “three times” the amount of time to get Osama, but didn’t.

Ok, let me see, 8 years times 3 is……oh nevermind.

Macsmind gives him a shot in the arm for his lies:

This pathological lying bastard must forget how many people were involved in the hunt and the memories of “the truth” are a lot more clearer. So Bill, where is the “proof” of that plan to go into Afghanistan? What “plans” did you draw up? Don’t seem to remember that. You see a liar always has to keep on telling lies to keep the lies going. Bill just stepped on it in major way. He got one thing right though, he failed. He failed the nation and the blood of 3000 is squarely on his hands.

Here is Wallace’s take about the interview: (via Newsbusters)

WALLACE: It… I’ve never… I’ve been in the business a long time and I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Certainly not involving a president or former president. Quickly, the venue was the Clinton Global Initiative. He has this quite extraordinary program where he gets people from around the world, raises money to deal with problems in the developing world. Poverty, health, climate change. He raised $7 billion. And he agreed — and is doesn’t usually agree — to appear on Fox News. First time he’s ever done a one on one interview on Fox News Sunday. 2 ground rules — 15 minutes have to be on the Clinton Global Initiative and the other half on anything we wanted to talk about. So, we started off fine. We were talking about the initiative, his efforts. And then I said, because I’d gotten a lot of email, “people want to know why didn’t you do more to bring Bin Laden to justice? Why, during your 8 years, didn’t you go after Al Qaeda?” And I’ve got to say, Brian… you know, you figure he would be prepared to deal with that. He went off. He just… he started talking. He wanted to go back to Somalia in ’93 and the USS Cole. He says that this is all basically an effort by right-wing critics to diminish his administration and that George W. Bush isn’t held to same account. That he did a heck of a lot better job 2-3 months after the Cole than George Bush did in the 8 months that he had after the Cole as president before 9/11 happened. The interesting thing was, I was mindful of the 15 minutes and the 50/50 rule so I kept on trying to bring him back. He wanted to go into it and we ended up doing an interview that lasted, I think, 22 minutes.

Sister Toldjah:

You know what burns me up about the interview? Not the fact that Clinton gets uptight and defensive, but the fact that he says the Bush admin “didn’t try” (that’s who he meant when he referred to the “right wingers” who had several months to get OBL). Bush has never once blamed Bill Clinton for his failure to get OBL. Not once. This is an incredible cheap shot on the part of Clinton. Not entirely unexpected, but a cheap shot all the same.

Kathryn Jean Lopez:

It was Bill Clinton’s Tom Cruise moment, though Cruise sounded saner talking about anti-depressants to Matt Lauer

This Byron York article puts Clintons assertion that the military wouldn’t let him go after Osama to shame.

the former president based nearly his entire defense on one source: Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, the book by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. “All I’m asking is if anybody wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book”, Clinton said at one point in the interview. “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,” he said at another. “All you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s findings and you know it’s not true,” he said at yet another point. In all, Clinton mentioned Clarke’s name 11 times during the Fox interview.

But Clarke’s book does not, in fact, support Clinton’s claim. Judging by Clarke’s sympathetic account, as well as by the sympathetic accounts of other former Clinton aides like Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon it’s not quite accurate to say that Clinton tried to kill bin Laden. Rather, he tried to convince as opposed to, say, order U.S. military and intelligence agencies to kill bin Laden. And when, on a number of occasions, those agencies refused to act, Clinton, the commander-in-chief, gave up.

Clinton did not give up in the sense of an executive who gives an order and then moves on to other things, thinking the order is being carried out when in fact it is being ignored. Instead, Clinton knew at the time that his top military and intelligence officials were dragging their feet on going after bin Laden and al Qaeda. He gave up rather than use his authority to force them into action.

Examples are all over Clarke’s book.

Other’s Blogging:

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“It’s pretty obvious from the start of the video that Clinton went into the interview ready for a fight and just waited until Chris Wallace gave him the opening.”

Mike,

Yeah…I think maybe so too. But I can’t get it out of my mind that this was far more than that and far WORSE. There is something in the wind…and it’s PANIC!! Someone left a comment somewhere wondering about all the investigations into leaks and such, and supposes that whatever they might reveal will destroy not only “THE LEGACY” but could do permanent damage to “the party”. I mean, the hell with the country, right? It’s Clinton and the party that have to survive here! Having gone back and seen the interview for the second time, I am more convinced than ever that Clinton may have gone in with the idea of punishing Fox, but lost his temper and behaved like he did in the White House time after time after time!! AND, Chris Wallace on Fox & Friends this morning said that as soon as Clinton was through with him (Wallace) he turned on his own staff, right there on the set! Is that a calm and rational man, I ask you…or a raving lunatic who can’t control himself anymore (not that he ever did)?

No, I sorta doubt this was one of his “calculated” triangulations…although the days and weeks of “spin” coming certainly will be! And will SOMEONE PLEASE ask Hillary what is her take on all of this? If she is going to try and drag this lunatic back into the White House, we need to know just what she thinks is going on here. She’ll probably jump to his defense again anyway. Sigh.

We have just SEVEN more weeks to go until perhaps one of the most important elections in our lifetime. Put your game faces on, people! Those who are fighting and sacrificing in Iraq, Afganistan, and those who are behind the scenes (intel and FBI) are doing so that we may participate in the most important duty that we have to ourselves and our country…the right to VOTE! Don’t stay home. THAT would be the real tragedy here.

Carol

Put the whole video up on the update Carol….amazing isn’t it? He can see his legacy slipping away from him and he is pissed.

What a worthless POS

Just how naive can people be, that still after all the proof, they still believe ANYTHING this joke has to say? Talk about an attention deficit/short term memory loss. He bent the entire nation and world for that matter, over and put it to us. Yet still there are millions of lemmings that pay any attention whatsoever to his BS. He first did Monica, and then had the cowardice to screw everyone that was dumb enough to hold still for it. He took the most powerful office in the world and prostituted it out for what? Sometimes I am ashamed for us. We are as sheep, and sometimes deserve it for our absolute stupidity. WTF will it take for the sheep to climb our dumbasses out of this world-view of apathy and avarice? Are we too ashamed to admit we where all taken as suckers, eat the lesson, and resume standing on our rear legs. We have been fooled into thinking we are bad/immoral/weak/bullies/bastards of the earth. Think people, think, we became the most revered nation on the planet by what unites us, not devides us! If it smells like/tastes like/looks like BS, for goodness sakes don’t step in it, let alone feel like it!!

Think Progress has the rough-but-ready transcript.

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