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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Clinton v Fox News « Previous | |Next »
September 25, 2006

This is a transcript of Bill Clinton taking on Chris Wallace at Fox News as Wallace tried to beat Clinton up over not doing enough to take out Bin Laden when he was president in the 1990s. It's worth a read or a listen.

I guess Wallace voices the Republican position that the finger should be pointed at Clinton--he should have done more to stop Osama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks.This is part of the Republican strategy to paint the Democrats as unreliable in the war on terror and to establish a fundamental difference between the Democrat and Republican parties. It's only Bush and the Republicans who know we are in a serious war. It's not the Democrats. The left wing of the party continues to insist on withdrawal now. The center of the party wants withdrawal on a vaguer timetable. And it's not just Iraq: the Democrats are committed to kinder and gentler treatment of terrorists.

Bush, on other hand, understands that the only acceptable exit strategy is victory. Their talking point is that the country will be safer from terrorism if the GOP retains control of Congress.So the Republicans will interpret this interview as Wallace standing up to an aggressive Clinton who lost his temper endeavouring to silence his critics.

Update: 30th September
Then Clinton goes and gives a seductive speech towards the end of the Labour Party Conference:

Clinton.jpg
Steve Bell

And they loved being urged to remain the change agents and to stay in the future business.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:06 PM | | Comments (6)
Comments

Comments

Clinton is a good politician. Completely unintimidated and controlling the debate even when he has to adlib.

Cam,
and still on the top of his game by the looks of it.

Gary, He would be in his fourth term now if there weren't term limits. There was no-one to replace his political skills or acumen on either side of the aisle.

Cam,

the man is a political wizard--once in a lifetime.

But the interview does show how the Republicans control the political agenda. Clinton had his back to the wall on the issue of "protecting the American people from further attack".

It is terrorism that is triggering a full-blown spat between the Bush and Clinton camps: who was more responsible for failing to disrupt al-Qaeda before it could attack the United States?

Clinton was very good in defence but he was defending himself and the Democrats on Republican territory.

Gary, I think they control the political agenda in as much as the Republicans have the executive in the same the Liberals do at the Commonwealth level and Labor in the states.

Fox News is their home turf too. It is no different to Evil Pundit wading in at Larvatus Prodeo or Anonymous Lefty at timblair.net

Media is heavily segmented now. It is chutzpah that they went after a former President, but Bush will face the same, though I doubt he will put himself in that position. He doesn't now. I suspect Bush will be politically managed until he dies. A kind of political Howard Hughes.

I think it also indicative of Congress' waning power, the fights between party machines now occurs on cable rather than in congress or in committee.

Cam,
I agree that Clinton remains capable of seizing the nation's attention and shaping the national debate in a way that Carter cannot. He still has considerable presence. The meltdown in the news magazines over the Clinton moment on Fox news showed that.

I guess that the effect of Clinton's spat with Fox was to open up a way to discredit terrorism as a merely partisan political issue.

William Kristo's response writes in The Weekly Standard is to introduce Iraq:

The most important front in the confrontation with terror-sponsoring, WMD-seeking Islamic jihadism in the next two years may well be Iran. Republicans are viewed by a 12-point margin as the party that would be more likely to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. We have been critical of the Bush administration's lassitude in attending to this task. But with sand in the diplomatic hourglass running out, voters can fairly be asked: Would Bush have more help in denying Ahmadinejad nuclear weapons from a Congress controlled by Republicans or by Democrats (whose main suggestion has been to cozy up to Iran without insisting that it verifiably suspend its nuclear program)?

I guess that response shows the impact of Clinton's intervention.