Clinton Unplugged
I don't think I've ever seen a Presidential interview quite as raw-nerved as this one. Clinton can be clever, he can -- come on, you know it -- be slick. But here he goes mano a mano with Chris Wallace. Rough transcript: HERE. I don't usually watch Fox (you might say), but this is going to be on Sunday, it sounds like. I might have to figure out what channel that is. Isn't it like forty or something?
Read this transcript. This is something else.
Read this transcript. This is something else.
posted by JimK at 11:45 PM
10 Comments:
After reading the interview, I'm more convinced than ever that Clinton was the main reason Bin Laden's group grew unchecked. His attempts to bully the interviewer are pathetic.
French paper says bin Laden died in Pakistan
Saudi Arabia is convinced al-Qaida leader died of typhoid, paper says
PARIS - A French regional newspaper quoted a French secret service report on Saturday as saying that Saudi Arabia is convinced that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan last month.
L’Est Republicain printed what it said was a copy of the report dated Sept. 21 and said it was shown to President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and France’s interior and defense ministers on the same day.
“According to a usually reliable source, the Saudi services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead,” the document said.
Jim,
Fox News Sunday is on the local Fox outlet, WTTG,Channel 5 on cable in Montgomery County (that is the over-the-air channel, as well) at 9 am.
Clinton showed how to respond to conservative spin: With facts, with clarity, and with firmness. He did not let Wallace push him around and insisted on giving full answers.
The interview also shows the tragedy of the Clinton Presidency. While he has enormous intelligence, wisdom, and commitment to making the world a better place, and while much was accomplished in his years in office, so much more could have been done had the right-wing not gone into a personal attack mode from the beginning, aided and abetted by the media, and had Clinton not given them ammunition by giving in to extra-marital sexual temptation. At the end of the day, the Starr investigations did not show that Clinton did anything wrong, other than lying in public about a sexual liaison.
"He did not let Wallace push him around and insisted on giving full answers."
It was quite the other way around. Clinton kept interupting and not letting Wallace finish his sentences.
Facts? Like what? He demonstrated U.S. resolve by waiting a couple months after Black Hawk Down before running out?
If Bin Laden's alive, he must be having a good chuckle. He's got cable in his cave so all he can do on clear days is sit inside and watch TV.
You gotta love scientists. Once they believe something, they've got faith. No matter what evidence or data turns up, they'll keep on believing.
"Study: Oceans have cooled in recent years
Updated: 6:14 p.m. ET Sept 21, 2006
Despite the long term warming trend seen around the globe, the oceans have cooled in the last three years, scientists announced today.
The temperature drop, a small fraction of the total warming seen in the last 48 years, suggests that global warming trends can sometimes take little dips.
In the last century, Earth's temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.56 degrees Celsius). Most scientists agree that much of the warming in the past 50 years has been fueled by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities.
"This research suggests global warming isn't always steady, but happens with occasional 'speed bumps,'" said study co-author Josh Willis, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This cooling is probably natural climate variability. The oceans today are still warmer than they were during the 1980s, and most scientists expect the oceans will eventually continue to warm in response to human-induced climate change.""
You notice they leave out a little fact- which is that "most scientists" believe this even though no studies have proven it. Why do "most scientists" believe this? I guess they read the paper.
BTW, that would be zero hurricanes hitting the U.S. this year. The ones that did meander through the Atlantic were weaker than usual this year.
wow, amazing response. I love how he not only can hold his own but also admit some of his failures.
David writes,
Jim,
Fox News Sunday is on the local Fox outlet, WTTG,Channel 5 on cable in Montgomery County (that is the over-the-air channel, as well) at 9 am.
Clinton showed how to respond to conservative spin: With facts, with clarity, and with firmness.
You have got to be kidding...I have rarely seen such a display of ugliness than Mr. Clinton's "interview"...
He did not let Wallace push him around and insisted on giving full answers.
You are so right...he not only did not let Wallace puch him around, he did more than enough pushing around. Pathetic.
The interview also shows the tragedy of the Clinton Presidency. While he has enormous intelligence, wisdom, and commitment to making the world a better place, and while much was accomplished in his years in office, so much more could have been done had the right-wing not gone into a personal attack mode from the beginning, aided and abetted by the media, and had Clinton not given them ammunition by giving in to extra-marital sexual temptation. At the end of the day, the Starr investigations did not show that Clinton did anything wrong, other than lying in public about a sexual liaison.
Ok, now that we have had the spin, here is a fact:
Bill Clinton is now, and shall remain for the time being (because a Democrat could get elected and he could get pardoned), a convicted PERJURER. Now, I understand this must be a bitter pill to swallow, but that was the CHOICE Clinton made.
Theresa writes,
No David.
that's lying UNDER OATH.
Perjury.
David, Theresa is correct here...any idea why perjury might be different than lying? Perjury takes place when someone takes an oath as part of judicial proceedings to tell the TRUTH, and then lies. It is one thing to lie...we all do it; it is an entirely different species to lie UNDER oath. That is called PERJURY.
Any idea why this is treated in such a serious manner (since it really is only a lie)? That is also easy to answer. For any individual to lie under oath, i.e. commit PERJURY, is an attempt to subvert the judicial process (and give the individual committing perjury an unfair advantage...after all, I think you would agree that all should be treated equally before the law...right?).
Or does it depend on what the definition of "is" is.
If there is any single tragic flaw in Clinton it is this: that he is more smart than he is good. Pity.
And teaching all our kids about oral sex and that oral sex isn't really sex after all....
Yes, sadly, this as worked its way into the culture...
And defaming the office of the Presidency...
Well, he certainly sought to emulate another Democrat that had the morals of an alley cat...JFK.
Not to mention, there are a lot of folks that think he used the CIA to have folks killed, hey but whatever.
Please...enough of the conspiracy theories about Vince Foster. He was suffering from depression and took his own life. End of story. The Right discredits themselves when they indulge in this paranoid theory.
As I recall, it was conservative Ken Starr who insisted on putting every salacious detail of the affair into his publicly released report that brought oral sex into our living rooms on the evening news, an affair that Clinton, like most adulterers, did everything in his power to keep secret from his family.
It is a sad fact that married Americans sometimes have extramarital affairs but most adulterers do not have Richard Mellon Scaife's Arkansas Project, a special prosecutor conducting a fruitless Whitewater investigation, and every elected member of one party out to get them. Married men often have affairs with much younger women, in fact, some like Theresa's neighbor, take it so far as to abandon their wife and family to begin a new one with the younger woman.
In the end, Clinton saw the light and did the right thing. It's too bad we can't say the same thing about Bush and Iraq.
Theresa,
I expected that my comment would bring out the vitriol against President Clinton. And that vitriol is, at one level, justified. Please note that I included in my explanation of the tragedy of Clinton's Presidency the fact that he had "given them ammunition by giving in to extra-marital sexual temptation." I agree that Bill Clinton was a man with personal failings, and one of those failings had a negative impact on our culture. The tragedy is that he did so much good otherwise, and could have done a lot more if that personal failing (which had nothing to do with governance) had not become public.
The marital infidelity was worse than the lying about it. Was it technically perjury? Maybe, maybe not -- but if it had been, I suspect that Ken Starr would have brought indictments.
The biggest part of the tragedy was, as the last poster noted, the constant, well-funded effort to play gotcha on Clinton. Politics by personal smear is destructive. And, if you believe those who say that Clinton did not launch missiles into Afghanistan after the bombing of the Cole because he was afraid of a "Wag the Dog" scenario, then perhaps Ken Starr and the vast right wing conspiracy (and it was there for the entire Clinton presidency) bear some of the responsibility for not getting Bin Laden.
Where would the country have been during the Cuban Missile Crisis if Kennedy's political opposition had been able to fill the headlines with stories of his extra-marital activities?
I agree that our political leaders should be role models. But it is hard to find people with the drive to go into presidential politics and succeed who are perfect human beings. Richard Nixon, by all accounts, was a faithful husband; but he also lied in the most vile manner about his political opponents (remember, he got elected to the House and then the Senate by incorrectly calling the Democratic candidates Communists) and he engaged in or countenanced and certainly covered up illegal activity aimed at the integrity of our democratic system. LBJ was apparently not so faithful, but he ended American apartheid; his tragic decisions about Viet Nam had nothing to do with his personal failings as a husband. Franklin Roosevelt probably saved American democracy and capitalism and guided us successfully through World War II; but he continued to see his mistress behind his wife’s back until his death.
I would like to equate marital fidelity with wisdom in all things public. But history does not support that idea as an absolute.
Getting back to Clinton, the vitriol is, I think, rooted in the idea that some people in this country equated him, as a symbol at the time he was elected in 1992, of all that they did not like about the 1960s. So all their anger about the changes in society (including, sadly, some of the changes that were good) was all focused on Clinton. And when his behavior played into one of those bases for anger, he became, even more, a surrogate punching bag for all those frustrations.
As a baby boomer, I am very disappointed in what the baby boom produced for the Presidency. Bill Clinton, for all his potential, missed an opportunity to put and keep America on the right track. George Bush has put us, in all too many ways, on the wrong track.
Anon quoted an article which reported, "Despite the long term warming trend seen around the globe, the oceans have cooled in the last three years, scientists announced today."
Here's some scientific data that might shed some light on the cooling ocean temperatures.
"Greenland Glaciers Losing Ice Much Faster, Study Says
John Roach
for National Geographic News
February 16, 2006
Due to global warming, glaciers on Greenland are slipping into the ocean twice as fast as they were just five years ago, scientists announced today.
Current estimates already suggest that Greenland is contributing to rising seas. Now it seems that those estimates may have underestimated the melting island's effect, says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena..."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0216_060216_warming.html
"National Geographic News
Photo in the News: Arctic Ice Melting Rapidly, Study Shows
September 14, 2006—The rate of ice loss in the Arctic is accelerating rapidly, scientists say.
According to data from NASA's QuikSCAT satellite, between 2004 and 2005 the Arctic lost an unprecedented 14 percent of its perennial sea ice (shown in white)—some 280,000 square miles (725,000 square kilometers), or an area the size of Texas.
Perennial ice remains year-round and has a thickness of ten feet (three meters) or more. That ice was replaced with seasonal ice 1 to 7 feet (0.3 to 2.1 meters) thick (shown in pink), which is much more vulnerable to melting in the summer.
Since the 1970s summer ice in the Arctic has reduced at a rate of 6.4 to 7.8 percent per decade, the researchers write in the September 7 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. This suggests ice loss may now be occurring up to 18 times more quickly."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060914-arctic-ice.html
"NASA Mission Detects Significant Antarctic Ice Mass Loss
March 02, 2006
The first-ever gravity survey of the entire Antarctic ice sheet, conducted using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), concludes the ice sheet's mass has decreased significantly from 2002 to 2005.
Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr, both from the University of Colorado, Boulder, conducted the study. They demonstrated for the first time that Antarctica's ice sheet lost a significant amount of mass since 2002. The estimated mass loss was enough to raise global sea level about 1.2 millimeters (0.05 inches) during the survey period, or about 13 percent of the overall observed sea level rise for the same period. The researchers found Antarctica's ice sheet decreased by 152 (plus or minus 80) cubic kilometers of ice annually between April 2002 and August 2005..."
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2006-028
Maybe the chucks of perennial and glacial ice, some which are the size of US states, that are dropping like flies into the sea account for the oceans' cooling.
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