I think everyone has been waiting for Dick Morris to give us his take on the Bill Clinton meltdown in his interview (transcript) with Chris Wallace after being asked the rather benign and simple question as to why his administration didn't do a better job connecting the dots.
In an article this morning on The Hill's Congress Blog, Morris responds:
But beyond noting the ex-president’s non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the “definition of ‘is’ is” could perform.
Just before this blistering indictment, Morris gives us this little bit of insight into the man, Bill Clinton:
From behind the benign façade and the tranquilizing smile, the real Bill Clinton emerged Sunday during Chris Wallace’s interview on Fox News Channel. There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation.
And Dick Morris was Bill Clinton's only friend. Yikes!
Read it all.
Related:
Tom Maguire weighs in with Fact-Checking Bill Clinton - We Give Him The Byrd:
The Bill Clinton - Chris Wallace interview has brought out the fact-checkers:
Patterico finds that, contra Clinton, Fox News has asked a Bush official the same "connect the dots" questions that were put to Clinton;
Jim Geraghty at NRO pummels Clinton's notion that Osama was not part of the Somalia story;
And I will take a swing at Clinton's claim that his problems with Somalia were compounded by right-wing critics:
CLINTON: And I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn’t do enough said I did too much — same people.
They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in Black Hawk down, and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.
Let's cut to the NY Times summary of the discussioPren in Oct 1993 following the "Black Hawk Down" debacle:
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On Bill Clinton: "I felt like a mountain was coming down in front of me" ... Updated
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