BILL CLINTON KICKS SOME ASS AT FOX

From USA TODAY courtesy of Eschaton, a transcript from an upcoming interview on Fox News:

Clinton: OK let's just --

Wallace: May I just finish the question sir? And after the attack, the book says, that bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is always 20/20 --

Clinton: No, let's talk about it.

Wallace: But the question is, why didn't you connect the dots and put him out of business?

Clinton: Let's talk about it. I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises. I'm being asked this on the FOX network. ABC just had a right-wing conservative running their little pathway to 9/11, falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 commission report with three things asserted against me directly contradictory to the 9/11 commission report. And I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say I didn't do enough claim that I was too obsessed with bin Laden.

All of President Bush's neo-cons that I was too obsessed with bin Laden, they had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say I didn't do enough, said I did too much, the same people. 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 and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.

OK, now let's look at all the criticisms, Black Hawk Down, Somalia, there is not a living soul in the world who thought Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down or was paying any attention to it, or even knew al-Qaeda was a going concern in October 93.

Wallace: I understand.

Clinton: No, no, wait. Don't tell me that -- you asked me why didn't I do more to bin Laden, there was not a living soul, all the people who now criticize me wanted to leave the next day. You brought this up, so you get an answer.

Click here for the rest.

As I've said many times before, Bill Clinton is a conservative Democrat with whom I have many problems. On the other hand, he's probably the most gifted American politician of the second half of the twentieth century--I would definitely put him in the top five all time list. And this interview shows why: unlike most of his pussified party colleagues, Elvis doesn't roll over and die when attacked; Bill Clinton fights back. And that's exactly what he does in this interview, which is slated to be aired on whatever version of Meet the Press Fox runs on Sunday. Apparently the original right-wing nutcase blogger Matt Drudge is already trying to spin this as a Clinton freak-out, but the transcript reads like the former President won with a devastating full court press.

So, bravo.

But what gets me is that Clinton's style of argumentation isn't too terribly difficult to emulate. It's really basic high school debate: know your opponent's points beforehand, know what to ignore and what to press, know when to attack and when to retreat, but don't back down one damned bit. Why do I so rarely see Democrats do what I was successfully training my public speaking students to do for six years back when I was teaching high school? This is old school democracy, the kind of thing they were doing in the British Parliament centuries ago. When did the Democrats decide that the best way to win elections was to shrink away from fist-slinging arguments like a bunch of Southern church ladies?

Bunch of pussies. I hope some of them watch and learn when this airs on Sunday.

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