Bill Clinton steps up

President Clinton recently used the world-wide respect he enjoys to convene a historic meeting of world leaders from business and varied fields to actually DO SOMETHING about the perilous state of the world.

It doesn't take a genious to realize that this is quite a reflection on the utter abandonment of leadership on so many issues crucial to the world by this incompetent and war-obsessed administration.

Richard Branson, the renegade adventurer and mogul of Virgin enterprises pledged several billion dollars, all the profits of his airline and train companies, to the effort to address climate change, and other's addressed a host of pressing problems nearly ignored by Bush.

The effort got near universal praise and has inspired hope for millions around the world.

In this light, Clinton agreed to sit down with Faux News' Chris Wallace for an interview to discuss this important effort.

But for Fox, it was more imperitive to try to grill Clinton about the lies which have been told attempting to blame him and his administration for 9-11, essentially saying, falsely, that Clinton had many opportunities to take out bin Laden and purposely didn't.

This is provably false, and refuted by any number of courses, including the official government 9-11 report, the report which the propaganda laden ABC series purporting to tell the story of the lead up to 9-11 said it had based the show on, but much of the show was pure fiction, distorting history and attempting to blame Clinton administration figures for letting bin Laden escape, directly contradicting all official reports.

Yet when Clinton objected to this and asked that at the very least, that blatantly made up events not be presented as historical fact, the right had a fit.

Bill Clinton is not allowed to defend himself against anything, not even when provable lies are being aired as fact in an attempt to misrepresent both his role prior to 9-11 and history itself.

If Clinton says ANYTHING to even note that the right are LYING, the right simply goes nuts.

Now Chris Wallace disregards the fact that it was agreed that Clinton would be there to discuss his amazing and important effort to help the planet in positive ways, and instead REPEATS the right wing propaganda that he could have done more to take out bin Laden.

This is after weeks of press which showed beyond any doubt that such a claim is utterly FALSE.

So Clinton points out to little Chris that he did a hell of a lot more than Bush did in the 8 months he was in office prior to 9-11, and that as has been universally acknowledged, his administration briefed Bush and his people extensively and warned them that bin Laden and alQueda would be their number one threat and should be their number one priority.

The Bushies thumbed their noses at it and instead launched an effort to revive the star wars missle defense plan. They did NOTHING. Aschcroft even cut the budget for the FBI's counter terror unit.

A partial transcript of the interview can be read here. (Many thanks to alert reader tiz)

The interview is scheduled to be aired on Faux this Sunday. It will be interesting to see how they creatively edit it.

For an example of right wing frothing on this subject, see Paladin's comments on the post about Meet the Press below.