Whatever his policy achievements (there were some big ones) or his failures (there were a lot), Bill Clinton will surely go down in history as one of the most immature human beings ever to serve as chief executive. Here's the story, from Howard Kurtz at Washington Post:
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said that he was stunned when Bill Clinton accused him of a "conservative hit job" after he challenged the former president on his record in fighting terrorism.
"I thought it was a fair, balanced and not especially inflammatory question," Wallace said yesterday in recounting his "Fox News Sunday" sit-down with Clinton. "I even said, 'I know hindsight is 20/20.' But he went off. And once he went off, there was no bringing him back. He wanted to talk about it in detail. He wanted to conjure up right-wingers and conservative hit jobs and a theory involving Rupert Murdoch that I still don't understand."
Here is how Clinton's hissy fit happened:
Wallace began with a couple of questions about the initiative before citing the 1993 U.S. military withdrawal from Somalia and several bombings connected to al-Qaeda in asking, "Why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?"
In an impassioned, finger-wagging answer, Clinton told Wallace, a former ABC News correspondent: "You did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me. . . . You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about . . . what we did out there to raise $7 billion-plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care."
Clinton is not a stupid man. He knows he made mistakes, and that these mistakes were very costly to his reputation. But emotionally, he simply cannot take responsibility for them. They are always someone else's fault, some vast, right wing conspiracy out there. Clinton's sins don't matter because they pale in comparison to those of Kenneth Star, or Fox News, or whoever. The latest fit was a repeat of his snit in front of Peter Jennings.
Clinton has on occasion scolded other interviewers, most notably in a 2004 sitdown with ABC's Peter Jennings, who drew this response after alluding to Clinton's personal misconduct: "You don't want to go here, Peter. . . . Not after what you people did and the way you, your network, what you did with Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked."
Poor, poor, pitiful Bill.
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