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Clinton pwns Fox News
This made me grin.
Particularly since Fox tried to wipe out every single reccord of the interview off the internets. It's gone from YouTube and they took it off their own website. You can't even find the transcripts on Fox's website.
Internet struck back and posted it everywhere they could.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-649761639290777197
Particularly since Fox tried to wipe out every single reccord of the interview off the internets. It's gone from YouTube and they took it off their own website. You can't even find the transcripts on Fox's website.
Internet struck back and posted it everywhere they could.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-649761639290777197
Comments
Did you watch the same thing I did?
Rather then very quickly answering the question he dragged in for what, eight minutes?
Besides, he never answered the question. All he did was spin it by pointing out Bush's failures.
Come on now, when he said that Bush had eight months to get Bin Laden and failed I'm sitting here thinking, "8 months... 8 years..." Granted Bin Laden was not exactly known as a threat in '92 but you get the drift...
I give Clinton props for being a great politician, but that is not exactly a compliment.
Clinton also kept pounding the "Read Clarke's book," line but if you read his book you will find out the "demotion" was not a demotion as Rice and the others were not expecting Clarke to request the transfer to the new cyber-terrorism unit. How can it be a demotion if the person requests the transfer? Not only that, but the transfer was AFTER 9/11 not before as Clinton tried to imply.
Perhaps Clinton should have read the book first?
This is about Fox getting bitch-slapped in an interview by someone far too slick to take a punch on camera and then trying to bury it because it made them look stupid.
Yet he said he was "obsessed" with finding and killing him.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A61251-2001Oct2
The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture.
<snip>
Clinton administration officials recalled that the Saudis feared a backlash from the fundamentalist opponents of the regime. Though regarded as a black sheep, bin Laden was nonetheless an heir to one of Saudi Arabia's most influential families. One diplomat familiar with the talks said there was another reason: The Riyadh government was offended that the Sudanese would go to the Americans with the offer.
Half of his former advisors say he didn't have a plan to invade Afghanistan, but the other half say he did. Hardly anyone from either camp agrees on what actually went down. while he was in office, and I think there's a lot being left unsaid.
Thus, I can't judge Clinton based on what he tried to do, I can only judge what he did do. To not get into a big debate in this thread, I'll simply say that Clinton is one of my top 15 presidents, and I largely agreed with many of his actions in office.
Edit: posted while kite was posting. That was the link I was looking for
Can we just agree that no matter what is said, Clinton fans will stand behind his administration's bin Laden policies?
I've noticed that while I'm willing to admit that Bush II has made mistakes - No Child Left Behind, ignoring the Kyoto Protocol, declaring "mission accomplished," not defending Taiwan against Chinese takeover, backing the FCC television witch hunt - very few Clinton supporters are willing to do the same about Clinton's presidency.
Interesting mental exercise: I'll bet both main parties would be using the other's tactics against each other if John Kerry had been elected president before bin Laden attacked. What would have happened then?
I'm not saying this to be mean, or pig-headed, or partisan, and I wish that my docilely interested tone could come across over the forum. I don't want this to be a heated, contentious, mud-slinging thing. I just want people to be honest instead of entrenched.
Remember: back then, the only major crime we had evidence of was the Cole bombing. Osama was just one among many foreign discontents with a grudge against the United States. The people in power decided he wasn't worth the risk of a backlash.
I was behind Bush 100% when he invaded Afghanistan. He had the backing of the world and a clear, defined mission to overthrow the Taliban. I had a lot of optimism for the future of that nation under US guidance. I don't doubt that Kerry/Gore/Clinton/Perot would have done the same.
Of course, we pulled out as fast as possible in order to then invade and occupy the unrelated nation of Iraq. That's right about when I lost all respect for our dear leader. I don't think any of the people I mentioned above would have seriously considered invading Iraq during their administrations...
I really never cared much about politics. Until high school I couldn't really tell you the difference between right and left. I did however, always sort of dislike whoever was in power. I think that's mostly because all the stand-up comedians always ragged on the current president, and I tended to agree with people who made me laugh. As Lewis Black says "I have a problem with authority".
In hindsight, I miss Slick Willy. During the eight years Bill Clinton was president, life was grand. People weren't scared. The economy was growing at an insane rate. Technology advanced tremendously. The country was not heavily polarized. People were generally happy, and not angry. The 90's were the good times.
Bad things did happen while Clinton was president. None were quite as insane as 9/11, but they were still bad. You had the Oklahoma City bombing, Somalia, Israel/Palestine, embassy bombings, Bosnia, and more. With the exception of perhaps Rwanda, which can be blamed mostly on the UN, these things were taken care of as well as can be expected. The messes were cleaned up in a reasonable fashion, and our way of life remained largely undisturbed. The worst thing Clinton ever did was get it on with an intern and lie about it. Any reasonable man can only applaud that feat. The only question you could ask is "Weren't there any non-ugly interns to go after?"
I know that neither Clinton nor Bush are directly responsible for all the things that happen in the world during their terms. Many would say that FDR is more responsible for our current way of life than any president to date. Regardless, it's hard to disagree with someone who says that life in the US was happier in 1995 than in 2005. Surely, with the government playing such a large role in our lives, the decisions made by these men have something to do with that fact. It is almost impossible to deny that if Clinton were still president that the people of the United States that there would be less strife, less fear, more prosperity and more happiness in this country, and others.
You could uselessly debate for eternity whether 9/11 would still have happened if Clinton were in power at the time. You could debate for a second eternity as to how he would have handled it. Looking back on it now I am confident that if it had happened, no matter how he handled it, Clinton would have made sure it impacted our everyday lives far less than it has. He made sure that our way of life was safe and sound despite all the other terrible things going on in the world. For that alone, I would vote for him in less than a second.
Terrorists are legally categorized as enemy combatants and are not granted the right to due process or trial (this is why there was no trial for the three al-Qaeda operatives killed in Baghdad on Sept. 11, 2006, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi also in Iraq on June 7, 2006.
Clinton was brilliant in his own way (not just with the ladies, lol) as an energizer for the DNC, a campaigner extraordinaire, an incredibly apt scholar, and civil rights advocate. But he also launched the U.S. into completely tangential conflicts in Somalia and Bosnia. His West Bank policy failed miserably and contributed to the outbreaks of violence between PLO and Israeli forces. Clinton's fundraisers were tied to Chinese intelligence officers, resulting in the theft of ICBM, satellite, and nuclear arsenal information. Then there were repeated sexual accusations, Pardongate, and of course his dubious honesty about Monica.
I just don't get the disparity in public perception between Clinton and Bush. Why did his approval rating remain so and why is his legacy so iron-clad? Is it because he was better looking than Bush? They both have Southern accents, so it can't be a national bias against that. What is it?
I was stationed in Germany when all of that shit went down...
The mission began as something good and was turned to shit when a certain president decided something more had to be done to show he cared...
Once it was made clear that the US had "picked sides" we were a target.
What's worse is that the troops who were there WANTED to hear the order to go into the city with guns blazing.
Part of the tragedy of what occurred in Somalia was the troop cap in place and the fact that no one was willing to take orders from anyone not of their nation. Why do you think so much of the rescue operation when the Black Hawks went down was so fucked up?
If Clinton had just left things alone and not tried to "do something" with Somalia it would not have blown up as badly as it did...
Former Clintonites had expressed (privately) that Clinton's anti-war past made him feel as if his hands were tied in any matter that involved the military.
He had no problem giving us, "Don't ask, don't tell," which none of us wanted. Or the wonderful, "Hey, those guys with black berets feel special (yeah, 'cause they went through hell to earn the right to wear them) Let's give everyone a moral boost by having everyone wear black berets as part of the uniform. Then everyone will feel special..."
I served during the Clinton military years after having served during the Bush military years. I saw medals being given out like candy. Those medals are a symbol of what you have done and seeing someone get an Army Commendation Medal just because they hosted an exchange student for a week is downright insulting.
Granted it started at the end of the Gulf War when "everyone" got at least some sort of medal. Hell, the National Defense Service Medal is still given out just for serving! My brother was over in Desert Shield/Storm and got an ARCOM just for being a "good" mechanic... Medals were given out by rank... The higher the rank the better your medal... It was very sad to see the guys who had been in since Vietnam with medals on their dress uniform earned for true valor in combat being outdone by an officer who got a higher medal just for getting his paperwork in on time...
There... enough of my rant...
Clinton had two years with a Democrat Senate and he was not able to do much. It wasn't until the Republican Revolution and Newt Gingrich that things started to happen. Clinton may have taken things the Republicans wanted and made them his own but I don't much care who gets the credit as long as it gets done.
Do you think he would have passed Welfare Reform if there wasn't a Republican Senate pushing him?
I don't much care for a lot of the things Bush is doing today but he is a better president then Gore or Kerry would have been...
Damn I miss Reagan...
Also, there was a big problem with people leaving units in the normal course of changing duty assignments. There is a very large "human element" to the military that is often ignored.
There is a very good book on the subject written by a retired Warrant Officer. I can't recall the name of the book but it is very good.
If special forces or other non conventional methods are to be used, then the government should be fully willing to accept and deal with the possibility of a total loss. Hedging your bets when it comes to war is ludicrous.
Another thing. To hear Clinton tell it, the intelligence agencies pressured him out of office. Actually, it was the Constitution that forced him out of office. The Constitution kicks presidents out after 2 terms. Clinton's expired and he could no longer serve as president.
Clinton also said that he did more than some. Yeah, like Carter. No matter what you feel about Bush, you can't deny that he has done more (of harm or good is debatable) than Clinton did. We did get Saddam under Bush, no?
Now, this isn't an attack of Bush's intellectual capabilities, there's not doubt that he is a smart man, it's just that his public personality subjects him to a different type of ad hominem attack, ie he's a bumbling idiot. Whereas Clinton's public personality (and private, considering this video) was/is always johnny-on-the-spot, therefore he was attacked for being immoral and so forth, not his ability to tell/show the nation hes got it under control. So, when it comes it public opinion, in light of current events and a few seemingly dubious choices Bush and his administration have made, it's pretty obvious (or it seems to me) which personality the public would rather hear from.
My point was that they baited him onto their show under the false pretense of questioning him about the Clinton Global Initiative (which even George Sr. and Rupert Murdoch are giving money and support to) with hopes of continuing to smear him and he verbally bitchslapped the interviewer and called him on the bullshit.