RUSH: All right, now, back to Clinton. I’m going to try to get through this (laughing) without stopping the tape, Mike. Chris Wallace says, “Do you think you did enough, sir?”
CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.
WALLACE: Right.
CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridicule me for trying. [sic] They had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried, so I tried and failed.
RUSH: Stop the tape. Now, that was the segment that people have seen where he just lost it. I mean, if you saw that segment, that’s where he lost it. That’s when that finger was jabbing Chris Wallace’s papers — a long finger, by the way, just inches away from his nose, leading up on the front edge of the chair. Something else I noticed, I’m sure some of you did, too, somebody needs — and I’m serious. We’re talking about a former president. It’s really bad form to wear socks that are too short when you’re sitting down and your slacks are a little high on your calf up there, and you’ve got pasty white ankles and thighs, don’t even have a golf tan under there, it’s distracting. Some people actually thought Clinton was wearing white socks, in the e-mail, and I had to write ’em back, “No, not socks. He was wearing black socks. They’re just too short.”
What you saw there was Clinton showing a little leg. Who knows who he thought was in the audience? This was the portion where he just lost it, and this is when we knew, this is when it was confirmed that the movie got to him and that the truth is undermining his lie and his alternative reality that his entire legacy and existence has been built on. I think President Clinton runs around telling himself lies and has done so for so long, he really believes this stuff, folks. He really thinks that he was the only one who really made a serious effort to get bin Laden, nobody else has. He came so close, and the country owes him a debt of gratitude, and he didn’t understand the neocons and the right-wingers are out there ridiculing him, or trying. Nobody’s ridiculing you, sir, for “trying.” We’re ridiculing you for lying about it.
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RUSH: I want to keep the rhythm going because we put this together in sort of a timeline fashion in order to reply to the elements of Clinton’s comments as they occurred. We’re going to go back here to the previous sound bite. I did not get through the whole thing because I had to stop it. Chris Wallace here with the question,”Do you think you did enough sir?”
CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.
WALLACE: Right.
CLINTON: But at least I tried, that’s the difference in me and some including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridicule me for trying, they had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried, so I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy, and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.
RUSH: Stop the tape. He did not get demoted. We’ve quoted Clarke’s own book, he requested a change to the new cyberdivision, it didn’t even happen ’til after 9/11. Clarke was still at the National Security Council staff before 9/11 happen, he wasn’t demoted, he wasn’t fired. Clinton lying, sadly, again.
CLINTON: So you did Fox’s bidding on this show, you did your nice little conservative hit job on me.
RUSH: All right, stop the tape. Now, this is where it really began to get interesting to me. All this other stuff is typical Clinton, and so is this. Fox’s bidding on this show. This man is a former president, but he has been reduced here to a sniveling, whining baby who thinks that he has been set up. He’s a former president. He tried to broker Mideast peace, he was obsessed with bin Laden, he was dealing with some of the world’s biggest hooligans, and he’s allowed himself to get set up by Fox, by Chris Wallace and Fox News Sunday, and this is a conservative hit job on him that goes to what I’ve been saying. These people never get… These weren’t even hard questions, folks. That’s the thing about it. These are questions that he doesn’t get anywhere else. He’s protected, as are all the Democrats. They are protected. They’re not smeared by the mainstream media. They are protected. They are amplified. They are resurrected when they plummet. They are promoted. They are considered the smartest people in the world, the most accomplished, the most valuable. If it weren’t for these people fawning Clinton’s legacy wouldn’t have a chance anyway.
CLINTON: — set this meeting up because you’re going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch supported my work on climate change.
RUSH: Stop the tape. Now, this is juvenile. This is just juvenile. “You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Murdoch supported my work on climate change.” How many of you have stopped watching Fox News because Rupert Murdoch had a little fund-raising breakfast for Hillary? How many of you have stopped watching Fox because Rupert goes to Clinton’s little circle you-know-what here to raise and fleece money for hunger around the world. “We have all these domestic problems here in this country and I gotta feed the people of the world.” It’s just childish, folks, it is just literally, literally childish. You set this meeting, you agree to come on, sir. They extended an invitation. You agreed to come on. Set this meeting up because you’re going to get a lot of criticism from your network? What informs Bill Clinton on this? He is as much a kook fringe lib as everybody else out there in their blogosphere is what this means. He’s not this triangulator. I told you from the get-go, folks. He and Hillary are a team. He has to be the one to get the votes, so he tried to make himself out to be a moderate while Hillary was the hard-core leftist, but they both are, and they always have been, and Clinton is demonstrating that again.
CLINTON: Came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about — you said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care. You falsely accused me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia.
RUSH: Was there false accusation that aid and comfort was given to bin Laden? He’s running around with a guilt complex, I’m telling you, he’s got a lot of guilt and shame over this and he’s lying to himself about it and the last thing somebody who is lying can be confronted with is the truth, particularly pathological liar. You came here under false pretenses? (doing impression) “You told me that you were going to give me a softball interview and make me look good in the eyes of the world for raising all this money and caring about a bunch of damn poor people, and now you’re confronting me with this business about bin Laden.” This is just… Well, it’s beneath anybody who’s held the office of the presidency. Wallace then said, “But did they know in ’96 when he declared war in the US? Did they know in ’98 when he bombed these two countries? Did they know in 2000 when he hit the USS Cole?”
CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized to find him, for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody’s gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now, I’ve never criticized President Bush.
RUSH: Stop the tape. I can’t let this one go by. Never criticized the president? What, you mean, “on Sunday”? What about the previous five years? What about when you travel abroad and undermine the Iraq war policy? What about when you criticize the way the war on terror is being prosecuted? You’re doing it here. If I were still president, we’d have 20,000 troops down there somewhere. I issued a presidential finding for the CIA to kill him. They don’t think so. CIA doesn’t think so. FBI doesn’t think so. They never got the word to go forward from you, sir. This is actually sort of pitiful and pathetic. We’re watching a 60-year-old man here behave as an eight-year-old caught in a sandbox with the neighbor’s little daughter. Well, we are. I’m minding my own business here. I was just, you know, exploring my nudity, and she walked in on her own. What I was I supposed to do? All right, here’s the rest of this.
CLINTON: I don’t think this is useful. But you know, we do have a government that thinks that Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq, and you ask me about terror and Al-Qaeda with that sort of dismissive thing, and you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so clever. But I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it. But I did try, and I did everything I thought I responsibly could.
RUSH: Tried to do a lot: tried to cut taxes, tried to do this, tried to that. “Never worked harder” on all these things. You tried and tried and tried. Get that smirk off your face, look at that smirk. You think you’re so clever because you’re nailing me and so forth. That’s intimidating; that is threatening. I know it’s funny. It’s hilarious but it’s instructive here. This is a former president doing this stuff! Wallace tries to move on to the Clinton Global Initiative, says, “Can I ask you about the Clinton Global Initiative?”
CLINTON: You can.
WALLACE: I always intended to, sir.
CLINTON: No. You intended though to move your bones by doing this first, which is perfectly fine. But I don’t mind people asking me — I actually talked to the 9/11 Commission for four hours, Chris, and I told them the mistakes I thought I made, and I urged them to make those mistakes public. Because none of us had been perfect. But instead of anybody talking about those things, I always get these clever little political deals where they ask me one set of questions and the other guys another set, and it always comes from one source.
RUSH: Always comes from one source. I wonder who? Who is that one source? Probably the Mister Big on the vast right-wing conspiracy. Who is the Mister Big? He went on to say that they never ask these questions of the other guy. You’ve gotta be in utter denial. Never ask these questions to the other side? How many press conferences have there been where the Drive-By Media has demanded Bush admit he made mistakes in virtually every aspect of the war on terror and the war on Iraq? Never gets asked these questions. He gets asked constantly, “Why haven’t you gotten bin Laden? You’ve failed to get bin Laden. What are you doing to get bin Laden? The Democrats say the fact that you haven’t got bin Laden means the war on terror is a failure,” and he thinks the other side’s never asked this stuff!
By the way, we looked that up, too. Here’s Chris Wallace talking to Donald Rumsfeld, March 28th, 2004. Quote: “I understand this is 20/20 hindsight. It’s more than an individual manhunt. I mean, what you ended up doing in the end was going after Al-Qaeda where it lived, pre-9/11, should you have been thinking more about that?” So there’s Chris Wallace criticizing Rumsfeld for not doing anything pre-9/11. “What do you make of Richard Clarke’s basic charge that pre-9/11, this government, the Bush administration largely ignored the threat from Al-Qaeda? Mr. Secretary, it sure sounds like fighting terrorism was not a top priority.”
Now, you may not remember any of those interviews in 2004 with Secretary Rumsfeld by Chris Wallace and that’s because Rumsfeld didn’t blow a gasket and act like a little kid when he answered the questions. But to say that Chris Wallace has never asked these questions before is absurd. Now, Bob Beckel was on Fox today, and he’s trying to make the most of this, and I don’t blame him, I feel a little sorry for him, too. He said what Clinton was doing here was giving Democrats a road map on how to deal with these silly charges Democrats are soft on terror. Bill Clinton was telling them how to go out there and do it.
Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Wallace reports that Clinton walked out of there in a rage and threatened to fire his staff if they set him up like this ever again and if they goofed up. I’m telling you, this was not a planned strategy. If you think this was sort of some grand liberal Democrat strategy that’s outsmarted everybody. You have got it wrong. You’re being too smart by half. This was the Bill Clinton, real Bill Clinton, and this was unmasking, this is taking the camouflage off, this was getting rid of the mask. There was nothing staged about this, there was nothing programmed or rehearsed about it. This was not a message to Democrats, because Bill Clinton, in those minutes of the interview yesterday, couldn’t have cared less about the Democrat Party or anybody but himself.
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