It's just like old times. Bill Clinton delivers an impassioned speech, and within
24 hours the Web is bristling with documentation, establishing that nearly every
sentence was a lie.
The glassy-eyed Clinton cultists are insisting their idol's on-air breakdown during
a "Fox News Sunday" interview with Chris Wallace was a calculated performance,
which is a bit like describing Hurricane Katrina as a "planned demolition." Like an
Osama tape, they claim he was sending a signal to Democrats to show them how to
treat Republicans. Listen up, Democrats: Let's energize the undecideds by throwing
a hissy fit on national television!
The Clintonian plan for action apparently entails inventing lunatic conspiracy
theories, telling lots of lies, shouting, sneering, interrupting, and telling your
interlocutor, "(Y)ou've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so
clever" — all for asking a simple question. To wit: "Why didn't you do more to put
bin Laden and al-Qaida out of business when you were president?" The only thing
Clinton forgot to say to Wallace was, "You'd better put some ice on that."
Let me be the first to welcome Chris Wallace to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! If
the son of Mike Wallace is a member, can Chelsea be far behind?
According to Wallace, Clinton's aide, Jay Carson, demanded that the interview be
stopped a few minutes into Clinton's tantrum — just before the part where he threw
the lamp at Wallace. The last time Clinton got that red in the face, the encounter
ended with a stained dress. Even Muslims thought Clinton overreacted. But the
Clinton Kool-Aid drinkers tell us this was a masterfully planned set-piece by their
leader.
I also think Jessica Savitch's slurred, incoherent broadcast on "NBC Nightly News"
in October 1983 was intentional. Others say it was drug-addled breakdown that ended
her career, but obviously Savitch intended to speak in garbled gibberish on air as
a brilliantly executed prelude to her death in a ditch weeks later.
And when Stephen Colbert did a routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner
that bombed, I think he planned it that way.
Then there was Capt. Joseph Hazelwood's meticulously planned off-loading of 11
million gallons of crude oil off the Exxon Valdez.
Clinton shouted so many lies during his televised meltdown, only the World Wide Web
can capture them all. These are just a few.
Clinton yelled at Wallace: "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."
This is so crazy it's worthy of an Air America caller. Clinton has consistently
misrepresented the presidential directive about political assassinations. Clinton
did not order bin Laden assassinated. He did not even lift the ban on intelligence
agencies attempting to assassinate bin Laden.
What he did was lift the ban on political assassinations — provided that assassinating bin Laden was not the purpose of the
mission. So if U.S. forces were engaged in an operation to capture bin Laden, but
accidentally killed him, they would not be court-martialed.
Clinton said, "All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too
much — same people." As proof, he cites his humiliating withdrawal from Somalia,
claiming, "They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next
day after we were involved in 'Black Hawk down,' and I refused to do it."
He added, as if it mattered, "There is not a living soul in the world who thought
that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with 'Black Hawk down.'"
In fact, what Republicans objected to was Clinton's transforming a U.N. mission in
Somalia to prevent mass starvation into a much grander "nation-building" exercise
— something the Democrats now hysterically support in Darfur and oppose in Iraq.
Democrats long to see American mothers weeping for their sons lost in a foreign
war, but only if the mission serves absolutely no national security objectives of
the United States. If we are building a democracy in a country while also making
America safer — such as in Iraq — Democrats oppose it with every fiber of their
being.
When Clinton's "nation-building" in Somalia led to the brutal killing of 18
Americans, some of whose corpses were then dragged through the streets, Clinton did
what the Democrats are currently demanding we do in Iraq: He cut and ran.
Republicans didn't like that either, and it had nothing to do with whether it was
al-Qaida we were running from. It could have been Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, al-Dawa
or the Viet Cong. We ran, and the terrorists noticed.
Osama bin Laden told "ABC News" in 1998 that America's humiliating retreat from
Somalia emboldened his jihadists: "The youth were surprised at the low morale of
the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a
paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat."
If this is the message that Clinton is hoping to telegraph to the American people,
I hope the voters are listening.
