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This week’s Media Surge:
For the week that the Clinton Global Initiative ‘alternative government’ met in
NYC and several international leaders ridiculed Pres. Bush during speeches at
the United Nations: Bill Clinton Faults
Bush administration for ignoring warnings of 9/11 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/us/24clinton.html Watch the over-hyped FOX News Sunday interview video here (it’s Bill vs
Chris, How will this interview be edited?) http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/24/clinton-video/ Then compare it with MSNBC Keith Olbermann’s
Friday interview “We must get back to
thinking” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14960533/
Sunday’s Meet
the Press interview http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3898804/ Eat the Press: FOX’s selective editing of the Clinton video http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eat-the-press/2006/09/25/nice-little-conservative_e_30179.html Clinton also appeared in a Sunday evening In God’s Name panel, hosted by CNN’s Christine Amanpour,
that included Israel’s FM Simon Peres, the Queen of Jordan, IRA negotiator and
former Sen. George Mitchell (D-ME), others. Finally, he also appeared on Larry
King Live that night. FYI:
Ø
Conservative
FOX News and talk radio in general have declining ratings of late. It could be
a summer phenomenon or it might be voters are tired of the direct line between
the Bush White House and the FOX News desk. That 42% of Americans believe declining gas prices are a
result of manipulation in order to benefit Republicans in the November
elections is an indication that the public is definitely cynical about Bush 43. Ø
According
to CNN’s chief political analyst, Bill Clinton still has a 60% approval rating,
much better than Pres. Bush hovering around 40%, and Clinton only trails the
most popular Republican, Laura Bush. BRAVO! A
Textbook Definition Of Cowardice: comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News
interview
Commentary
by Keith Olbermann, Anchor, 'Countdown', MSNBC Sept. 25, 2006 The headlines about
them are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past president,
bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.
It is not important that the current President’s portable public chorus has
described his predecessor’s tone as “crazed.” Our tone should be
crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose
policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation’s marketplace of
ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose
would’ve quit. Nonetheless. The
headline is this: Bill Clinton did what
almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11,
and the current presidential administration. "At least I
tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.
"That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers
who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I
tried." Thus in his supposed
emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for
honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his
presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these
last five long years. The Bush
Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush
Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors. The Bush
Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden
Determined To Strike in U.S." The Bush
Administration did not try. Moreover, for the last
five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in
particular the President, has been given the greatest “pass” for incompetence
and malfeasance in American history! President Roosevelt
was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs—some of them, 17 years
old—before Pearl Harbor. President Hoover was correctly blamed for—if not the
Great Depression itself—then the disastrous economic steps he took in the
immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash. Even President Lincoln assumed
some measure of responsibility for the Civil War—though talk of Southern
secession had begun as early as 1832. But not this
president. To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity,
one would think someone else had been president on September 11th, 2001 -- or
the nearly eight months that preceded it. That hardly reflects the honesty nor
manliness we expect of the executive. But if his own fitness
to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep
our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now. Except
for this.
After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts—that he was
president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our,
unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or
shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility,
entirely Mr. Clinton’s. Of course he is not
honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and
slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done
for him, by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon. Consider
the timing:
the very weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show
the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is—not a check on terror, but
fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of
incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a
diversion, in a scapegoat. It
was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired—but a
propagandist, promoted: Promise
to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and
distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and
reward the useless. And don’t even be professional enough to assume the
responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for “e-mailing” you the
question. Mr. Clinton responded
as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration’s
negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. He was brave. Then again, Chris
Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my
credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I
would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail. The smearing by proxy,
of course, did not begin Friday afternoon. Disney was first to
sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to 9/11." Of that company’s
crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled
an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush’s new and improved history. The
basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky
scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11. The most curious and
in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the
Right Wingers who have advocated it—who try to sneak it into our collective
consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news
interviews—have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw. Had it been true that
Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the
Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having
bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For
mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so? That day, Republican
Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The Dog." Republican
Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment. Republican Senator
Ashcroft of Missouri—the future attorney general—echoed Coats. Even Republican
Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing. And of course, were it
true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky witch-hunt, who on earth
conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this
nation on its head for two years? Who corrupted the political media? Who made
it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism
analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this
very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East
who sought to attack us, here? Who preempted them in order to strangle us with
the trivia that was, “All Monica All The Time”? Who distracted whom? This is, of course,
where—as is inevitable—Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as
they think they are. The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by
three administrations, possibly four.
But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it’s
all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a
startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you. The distractions of
1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed,
not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President. Thus, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you
were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it, we have your sleazy
and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the
Orwell playbook too quickly. Thus, instead of some
explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told
that you have kept us "safe" ever since—a statement that might range
anywhere from zero, to 100 percent, true. We have nothing but your word, and
your word has long since ceased to mean anything. And, of course, the
one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe
from, Mr. Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los
Angeles wrong. Thus was it left for
the previous president to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us
have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack: You did not try. You
ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor. You ignored the evidence gathered by your own
people. Then, you blamed your predecessor. That would be a
textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice. To enforce the lies
of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past. That was one
of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair—writing as George Orwell—gave us
in the book “1984.” The great philosophical reality he gave
us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound
familiar to me. "The Party seeks
power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others;
we are interested solely in power... "Power is not a
means; it is an end. "One does not
establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in
order to establish the dictatorship. "The object of
persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of
power… is power." Earlier last Friday
afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the
closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham
Lincoln’s State of the Union address from 1862. "We must disenthrall
ourselves." Mr. Clinton did not
quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s sentence. He might well have. "We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save
our country." And so has Mr. Clinton
helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late
and bleak date, to save our country. The "free pass" has been
withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not
act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed
us—then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will
have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed
us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures, by
blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit
your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesn’t work anyway; which
only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country
further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone
advocate. And there it is, Mr.
Bush: Are yours the actions of a
true American? Watch Olbermann’s delivery of his ‘fire and brimstone’ here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15004160/ |
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