Dick Morris on Clinton/Wallace - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Ustwo · 09-26-2006, 03:43 PM

Quote:

From behind the benign facade and the tranquilizing smile, the real Bill Clinton emerged Sunday during Chris Wallace’s interview on Fox News Channel. There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation. Clinton jabbed his finger in Wallace’s face, poking his knee, and invading the commentator’s space.

But beyond noting the ex-president’s non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the “definition of ‘is’ is” could perform.

Clinton told Wallace, “There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down.” Nobody said there was. The point of citing Somalia in the run up to 9-11 is that bin Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance.

Clinton said conservatives “were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day” after the attack which killed American soldiers. But the real question was whether Clinton would honor the military’s request to be allowed to stay and avenge the attack, a request he denied. The debate was not between immediate withdrawal and a six-month delay. (Then-first lady, now-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) favored the first option, by the way). The fight was over whether to attack or pull out eventually without any major offensive operations.

The president told Wallace, “I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden.” But actually, the 9-11 Commission was clear that the plan to kidnap Osama was derailed by Sandy Berger and George Tenet because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination. They were fearful that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy.

Clinton claims “the CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible [for the Cole bombing] while I was there.” But he could replace or direct his employees as he felt. His helplessness was, as usual, self-imposed.

Why didn’t the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against “over-reaction.” In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a “failed bombing” and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was.

In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus.

Failure to grasp the import of the 1993 attack led to a delay in fingering bin Laden and understanding his danger. This, in turn, led to our failure to seize him when Sudan evicted him and also to our failure to carry through with the plot to kidnap him. And, it was responsible for the failure to “certify” him as the culprit until very late in the Clinton administration.

The former president says, “I worked hard to try to kill him.” If so, why did he notify Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape? Why did he refuse to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999? The answer to the first question — incompetence; to the second — he was paralyzed by fear of civilian casualties and by accusations that he was wagging the dog. The 9/11 Commission report also attributes the 1999 failure to the fear that we would be labeled trigger-happy having just bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake.

President Clinton assumes that criticism of his failure to kill bin Laden is a “nice little conservative hit job on me.” But he has it backwards. It is not because people are right-wingers that they criticize him over the failure to prevent 9/11. It was his failure to catch bin Laden that drove them to the right wing.

The ex-president is fully justified in laying eight months of the blame for the failure to kill or catch bin Laden at the doorstep of George W. Bush. But he should candidly acknowledge that eight years of blame fall on him.

One also has to wonder when the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman will cool. When will the chip on his shoulder finally disappear? When will he feel sufficiently secure in his own legacy and his own skin not to boil over repeatedly in private and occasionally even in public?

http://thehill.com/thehill/export/Th...is/092606.html
First Condi Rice political enemy.

Now Dick Morris, former Clintonista now independent commentator.

How much of Clinton's anger was righteous and how much was just an angry bitter man?

Whats interesting is while the left seemed to cheer on the only two term Democrat president since JFK, which is in itself something to think about, I believe Clinton has in a small part damaged the democrats even more for November. What should have been a cake walk for the democrats is looking to be a very close election. We have had demonization of the gulf war, we have had high gas prices, we have had a drumming of the evils of global warming, we have had a constant streaming of how Bush is stupid, Bush had approval rating in the sewer and yet......its getting closer every day.

My theory for this is simple. Its not as if any democrats or liberals are going to vote for Bush, they didn't in 2000, they didn't in 2004, and they won't in 2006 that number has not really changed in 2 years. No what it is, is that the moderate republicans, the economic republicans who were pissed at Bush and congress NOT acting like Republicans should and spending money hand over fist are starting to come back into the fold realizing that a democratic congress isn't going to do anything to stop spending but is going to give them a foreign policy they feel will be a disaster long term.

I hope they keep getting angry, I hope they all try to do what Plam Beach democrats attempted and show 'Loose change' at a fundrasier (word got out and they canceled the event). I want the Libermans of the party tossed aside, I want the cry to be 'impeach Bush!' and I want it loud.

The Republicans SHOULD lose in November. People in this country seem to have a two year attention span only and its been a bad two years for Republicans if not on paper most defiantly in the papers. If the Democrats can not gain more than a few token seats this fall you will have to question the leadership not in just how they govern the country, but if they are even competent enough to run the party.

Elphaba · 09-26-2006, 05:13 PM

I appreciate the link given. I didn't think you gave any credence to editorials.

dc_dux · 09-26-2006, 07:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

First Condi Rice political enemy.

Now Dick Morris, former Clintonista now independent commentator.

How much of Clinton's anger was righteous and how much was just an angry bitter man?
.

I'm puzzled by the "political enemy" reference. Maybe you can expand on that?

I havent seen anything that Condi said that that challenged what Clinton said or demonstrated how Bush did anything in the first 8 months to deal with the al Queda threat. Quite the opposite; she continues to perpetuate the myth in her own mind that Clarke did not give her a detailed and urgent general plan to deal with al Queda.

Dick Morris, an indepdendent commentator? Many in Washington describe him now as a political hack who makes his money trashing the Clintons. More power to him, but I dont take him seriously.

And as to the Clinton'a anger, I only hope that other Dems demonstrate the same righteous anger in the coming weeks. I agree the Dems have failed miserably in recent elections, primarily IMO because they let the Repubs define them with bombastic rhetoric that was never grounded in reality.

On the bright side, there is a new generation of Dem leaders emerging that will challenge the BS in a way that will appeal to independents and voters beyond the hard core Dem base. The two best are Rahm Emmanuel in the House (a former political strategist in the Clinton White House) who chairs the House Dem Campaign Committee and Barak Obama in the Senate.

The coming six weeks will be interesting. Unfortunately, we will be bombarded with negative ads on both sides, a sad commentary on the state of politics today.

host · 09-27-2006, 01:04 AM

hmmm.... Clinton, Wallace.... a second thread, now ?

Marvelous Marv · 09-28-2006, 10:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

I havent seen anything that Condi said that that challenged what Clinton said or demonstrated how Bush did anything in the first 8 months to deal with the al Queda threat. Quite the opposite; she continues to perpetuate the myth in her own mind that Clarke did not give her a detailed and urgent general plan to deal with al Queda.

How hard are you looking?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...r=HOME_2039404

Quote:

Rice: Clinton Claims 'Flatly False'
Secretary Of State Challenges Ex-President's Record On Fighting Terror

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(AP / CBS)

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false — and I think the 9/11 commission understood that."

(CBS/AP) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged former President Bill Clinton's claim that he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue al Qaeda, saying in an interview published Tuesday that the Bush administration aggressively pursued the group even before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post.

The newspaper published her comments after Mr. Clinton appeared on "Fox News Sunday" in a combative interview in which he defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and said he "worked hard" to have the al Qaeda leader killed.

"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Mr. Clinton said in the interview. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try."

Rice disputed his assessment.

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false — and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.

Asked about Mr. Clinton's comments Tuesday, President Bush declined to comment.

"I don't have enough time to finger point," he said at a joint White House news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Rice also took exception to Mr. Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the same company that owns Fox News Channel.

In the interview, Mr. Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of a "conservative hit job" and asked: "I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked, 'Why didn't you do anything about the Cole?' I want to know how many people you asked, 'Why did you fire Dick Clarke?"'

Rice portrayed the departure of former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke differently, saying he "left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security."

The reference to the Cole related to the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

The interview has been the focus of much attention – drawing nearly 1.2 million views on YouTube and earning the show its best ratings in nearly three years.

Rice questioned the value of the dialogue.

"I think this is not a very fruitful discussion," she said. "We've been through it. The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock and we know exactly what they said."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton saw it differently.

"I just think that my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take this," she told Newsday Monday.

Wallace said Sunday he was surprised by Mr. Clinton's "conspiratorial view" of "a very non-confrontational question, 'Did you do enough to connect the dots and go after al Qaeda?"'

"All I did was ask him a question, and I think it was a legitimate news question. I was surprised that he would conjure up that this was a hit job," Wallace said in a telephone interview.

©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Ustwo · 09-29-2006, 05:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

I'm puzzled by the "political enemy" reference. Maybe you can expand on that?

I havent seen anything that Condi said that that challenged what Clinton said or demonstrated how Bush did anything in the first 8 months to deal with the al Queda threat. Quite the opposite; she continues to perpetuate the myth in her own mind that Clarke did not give her a detailed and urgent general plan to deal with al Queda.

Ummm like Marv said, its been all over the place.

She basically called Clinton a liar.

dc_dux · 09-29-2006, 06:56 AM

Are you guys kidding?

This is what she said in the article:

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post."

What aggresive things? Details, please!

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false — and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.

The 9/11 Commission found they took no action from the Jan 01 Clarke memo or the Aug 01 NIE

I dont know how much clearer it can be....If its been "all over the place".....point to something more that this article that demonstrates any specific actions taken by Bush/Rice in the first 8 months.

This report from Bob Woodward's new book is certainly as credible as anything Dick Morris says:

Quote:

The CIA'S top counterterrorism officials felt they could have killed Osama Bin Laden in the months before 9/11, but got the "brushoff" when they went to the Bush White House seeking the money and authorization.

CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism head Cofer Black sought an urgent meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, writes Bob Woodward in his new book "State of Denial."

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and "sounded the loudest warning" to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, "They felt the brushoff."

Tenet and Black were both frustrated.

full article: http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-384345c.html

Marvelous Marv · 09-29-2006, 08:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

Are you guys kidding?

What aggresive things? Details, please!

She seems to be more interested in the welfare of our country than Bill Keller, inconvenient as that may be for some.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

This report from Bob Woodward's new book is certainly as credible as anything Dick Morris says:

You mean the Bob Woodward who interviewed Willam Casey after Casey died? THIS Bob Woodward?

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11172005.html

Quote:

From Reporter to Courtier
The Long, Long Fall of Bob Woodward

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

It's been a devastating fall for what are conventionally regarded as the nation's two premier newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times's travails and the downfall of its erstwhile star reporter, Judy Miller, have been newsprint's prime soap opera since late spring and now, just when we were taking a breather before the Libby trial, the Washington Post is writhing with embarrassment over the multiple conflicts of interest of its most famous staffer, Bob Woodward, best known to the world as Nixon's nemesis in the Watergate scandal.

On Monday of this week Woodward quietly made his way to the law office of Howard Shapiro, of the firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Doar, and gave a two-hour deposition to Plamegate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, a man he had denounced on tv the night before Scooter Libby's indictment as "a junkyard dog of a prosecutor".

Woodward's deposition had been occasioned by a call to Fitzgerald from a White House official on November 3, a week after Libby had been indicted. The official told Fitzgerald that the prosecutor had been mistaken in claiming in his press conference that Libby had been the first to disclose the fact that Joseph Wilson's wife [ie Valerie Plame] was in the CIA. The official informed Fitzgerald that he himself had divulged Plame's job to Woodward in a mid-June interview, about a week before Libby told Miller the same thing.

Seeing his laborious constructed chronology collapse in ruins, weakening his perjury and obstruction case against Libby, Fitzgerald called Woodward that same day, November 3. Woodward, the Washington Post's assistant managing editor, no doubt found the call an unwelcome one, he had omitted to tell any of his colleegues at the Post that he'd been the first journalist to be on the receiving end of a leak from the White House about Plame. He'd kept his mouth shut while two of his colleagues, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler had been hauled before Fitzgerald. He only told Post editor Len Downie a few days before Libby was indicted.

Shortly after the call from Fitzgerald. Woodward told Downie that he would have to testify. On Wednesday the Post carried a somewhat acrid news story along with Woodward's account of his testimony. Later in the day Howard Kurtz posted a commentary on the Post's website. It's clear from the news story and Kurtz's piece that his colleagues find Woodward's secretive conduct unbecoming (Downie tamely said it was a "mistake") and somewhat embarassing, given all the huff and puff about Judy "Miss Run Amok" Miller's high-handed ways with her editors.

And just as Miller and her editors differed strongly on whether the reporter had told them what she was up to, so too did Woodward's account elicit a strenuous challenge from the Post's long-time national security correspondent, Walter Pincus.

In Woodward's account of his testimony (which he took care to have vetted and later publicly approved by the Post's former editor Ben Bradlee) he wrote that he told Fitzgerald that he had shared this information -- Plame's employment with the CIA -- with Pincus. But Pincus is adamant that Woodward did no such thing. When the Post's reporters preparing Wednesday's story quizzed him about Woodward's version Pincus answered, "Are you kidding? I certainly would have remembered that."

Pincus told Joe Stroup of Editor & Publisher later on Tuesday that he had long suspected that Woodward was somehow entangled in the Plame affair. After Fitzgerald was appointed special prosecutor in the fall of 2003 Woodward had gone to Pincus and asked his colleague, in Pincus's words, "to keep him out of the reporting, and I agreed to do that."

Like many others, the Washington Post's staff had vivid memories of Woodward's unending belittling of the whole Plame affair as something of little consequence,"laughable", "quite minimal". Woodward said it on the Larry King show the night before the indictments, almost as if he was trying to send Fitzgerald a message.

For months Woodward has been working on a book about Bush's second term. The White House, ecstatic at Woodward's highly flattering treatment of Bush in Plan of Attack and Bush at War (Washington's retort to the Harry Potter series), has been giving Woodward extraordinary access, confident that he will put a kindly construction on their disastrous handling of the nation's affairs.

Judy Miller was savaged for accepting what she claimed to be special credentials from the Pentagon in return for confidentiality. So what are we to say about Woodward, who is given special access and then repays the favor by belittling the Plame scandal, while simultaneously concealing his own personal knowledge of the White House's schedule on the outing of Valerie Plame?

Woodward did not disclose his potential conflict of interest while he was pontificating on the airwaves about the Plame affair but he also apparently succeeded in stifling an investigation into his own role by his colleague Pincus. He may have also placed Pincus in legal jeopardy with his testimony to Fitzgerald that he had informed Pincus in June of 2003 about Plame. Pincus had testified under oath to Fitzgerald in September of 2004 that his first knowledge of Plame's employer had come in a conversation with a White House source at a later date.

So who was Woodward's source and what was his motive in calling Prosecutor Fitzgerald the week after Libby's indictment to disclose that he had talked to Woodward before Libby began his own speed-dial leaking? Woodward says it wasn't White House chief of staff Andrew Card. Rove's lawyer says it wasn't his client. Woodward also says he interviewed his source with 18 pages of questions, whose topics included yellowcake from Niger and the infamous October 2003 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged WMD.

After this initial interview with a White House official in mid-June 2003, Woodward learned enough that when he saw two other White House staffers shortly thereafter he had the phrase "Joe Wilson's wife" among his questions. So the first official did the leaking. He could well have been vice president Cheney, since Woodward's interview took place exactly at the time that Cheney's office was buzzing with alarm after a call from Pincus telling them he was working on a story about Joe Wilson.

That afternoon Cheney informed Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Libby spent the next week gathering a dossier on Plame. On June 23 Libby and Woodward talked on the phone. Woodward had his 18 pages of questions (meant for Cheney, according to Todd Purdum at the New York Times), and began to work his way through them. He says he can't recall Libby bringing up Plame's name.

It's our guess that Libby, eager to broach Plame's role to the Post's renowned investigative reporter, finally wearied on the endless questions, cut Woodward off and hastened off to lunch with Miller. Woodward claims he kept no notes, and so did Miller until her famous notebook with "Flame" in it turned up at the New York Times. All in all it was a bad leak day for Scooter, since Woodward wasn't working as a reporter but as historian-courtier, and Miller had been taken off the story by her editors.

If Woodward's first source was Cheney, why would the latter have called Fitzgerald on November 3? The admission by Cheney that he had spoken to Woodward could derail Libby's prosecution and also undercut possible charges of a breach of the Espionage act, by playing into the line Woodward took on the Larry King Show and elsewhere, that this was no dreadful affront to national security but indeed "gossip" and "chatter".

So much for the fortune's wheel. From Nixon's nemesis to Cheney's savior.

dc_dux · 09-29-2006, 09:57 AM

It seems to me that what you are saying is that you can't find anything specfic that demonstrates what Bush/Rice did for 8 months.

I understand.

host · 09-29-2006, 10:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

It seems to me that what you are saying is that you can't find anything specfic that demonstrates what Bush/Rice did for 8 months.

I understand.

I'm confused....do we need two simultaneous threads on exactly the same topic?

dc_dux · 09-29-2006, 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

I'm confused....do we need two simultaneous threads on exactly the same topic?

I'm confused as well...thats why I asked the same question in both places,figuring it might double the chance for a response:

can you point to something....anything....that demonstrates any specific actions taken by Bush/Rice in the first 8 months.

Instead, we just get double the obfuscation.

09-29-2006, 09:57 AM	#9 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	It seems to me that what you are saying is that you can't find anything specfic that demonstrates what Bush/Rice did for 8 months. I understand. __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire

09-26-2006, 05:13 PM	#2 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	I appreciate the link given. I didn't think you gave any credence to editorials.

09-27-2006, 01:04 AM	#4 (permalink)
host Banned	hmmm.... Clinton, Wallace.... a second thread, now ?