MSNBC continues to carry water for the GOP, courtesy of Newsweek:Clinton Loses His Cool
Was the former president justified in blasting a Fox News interviewer who questioned his administration’s counterterrorism record?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15002956/site/newsweek/Clinton and his national security advisor, Sandy Berger, who is ridiculed in the ABC mini-series for allegedly shrinking from efforts to assassinate bin Laden, regularly discussed the Al Qaeda problem and repeatedly pressed the U.S. military for more options against bin Laden. It was mainly the military, which feared another Desert One debacle, when eight U.S. commandoes died in a botched effort to rescue the American hostages in Tehran, that shrank from taking more aggressive action than cruise missile strikes. “No operation that was ever recommended to the president was ever turned down,” says Jim Steinberg, Berger’s former deputy and now dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.
And for the record, the Bush administration barely paid attention to bin Laden before 9/11, as documented by the 9/11 Commission and other inquiries. On Jan. 26, 2001—six days after Bush’s inauguration—an FBI report for the first time conclusively tied the USS Cole bombing in Yemen to Al Qaeda. A few weeks later, CIA Director George Tenet raised the stakes, calling bin Laden's global terror network "the most immediate and serious threat" to U.S. national security. Yet there was no retaliation for the Cole or any other Al Qaeda attack for eight months—the “principals” did not even hold a meeting on how to deal with the terrorist group—despite Tenet’s increasingly urgent warnings about an Al Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001. Even today, the Bush administration is spending more time, resources and energy on supposed state sponsors of terror, like Iraq, than on the terrorists themselves.
But, as is always the case with Bill Clinton, politics can’t be too far from his considerations. With Hillary Clinton expected to make a 2008 run, the former president and his wife have been going to great lengths to neutralize what they see as the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that almost brought Bill Clinton down in his second term. That has meant, for example, winning over ex-GOP foes one by one, inviting Laura Bush to speak at his forum, and buddying up to Fox News’ conservative owner, Rupert Murdoch. The charm campaign may also have been the reason for the former president deciding to grant his first-ever interview to Fox News Sunday.
But to Clinton, at least, Wallace seemed to be out to undermine those efforts, and not surprisingly, the Republican National Committee on Monday put out a sheet of talking points designed to raise questions about Clinton’s accusations against the TV interviewer. (In a bizarre twist during his on-air rant, Clinton even accused Wallace of setting up the interview “because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is supporting my work on climate change.”) Clearly, Clinton still has bitter feelings over the “fair and balanced” network’s coverage of him since the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his subsequent impeachment trial. Chris Wallace seem to have caught the brunt of it.