I also have to withdraw my name from any list of the politically educated.
In any case, let’s examine some the facts that allegedly bothered Clinton. Referencing the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” Somalia event in relation to Osama is ridiculous; at the time, who’d’ve made any connection to Al-Qaida? I’ll bet Osama, if he noted the event at all, cheered the American deaths. So what? There are earlier decisions made in the Reagan and Bush41 administrations that affected Afghanistan directly which in hindsight had hugely greater influences (Reagan’s withdrawal from Beirut after the barracks bombing was arguably much much worse, since it demonstrated the asymmetrical principal that one suicidal guy with a truck bomb could kill hundreds and shape American policy, while the Rangers and Delta Force in Somalia died in combat, inflicting at least 1000 casualties in the process), so if you’re going to dig into the past and find reasons to blame someone, why not start there? Or decades earlier during any past president’s dealings with Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia?
As for “spin”, I actually found Clinton’s responses to be refreshingly candid and direct, with little or no euphemism or rhetoric. He has the freedom to be candid, of course, being a former president. Clinton described this freedom pretty casually, right up until 4:07 in the video (linked in post #5) when Wallace, claiming rather disingenuously how “surprised” he was that many of the e-mails he received prior to this interview were asking him to ask Clinton “why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and Al-Qaida out of business when you were president?” Since this is supposedly unedited footage, Wallace is more than ten minutes ahead of schedule since he’d promised Clinton that 15 minutes would be spent on Clinton’s Global Initiative. Clinton thought about his answer, started to respond at 4:45, backed off to let Wallace finish his question (such as it was) and restarted at 5:07. I remember at the time the calls to get the heck outta Somalia, and I see Clinton does as well. Wallace tries to backpedal at 7:16 but Clinton won’t let him.
Clinton’s pretty frank about his desire to kill OBL as well as his failure to ultimately do so. No spin, there. Wallace, seeing Clinton isn’t going to back down or throw a hissy fit, tries to invite Clinton to talk about his Global Initiative at 11:26 but Clinton refuses, determined instead to answer the 4:07 question completely, as he said he would do. At 11:56, Clinton starts to slide into veiled and not-so-veiled criticisms of the Bush43 administration, which I think is understandable in those circumstances. Sprinkled in throughout are negative comments about Fox’s own bias, which I also find to have merit. At 15:34, after the first segment of the interview ends, Wallace rather unconvincingly says: “When we return we [half-smile, chuckle] finally get back to the Clinton Global Initiative…” as though Clinton was the one who sidetracked the discussion in the first place.
Beyond the fact that Clinton’s pants are too short, showing part of his ankles, I can’t fault him for a single thing during the interview. The overall impression I’m left with is an increased interest in reading Richard Clark’s book. If anything, Fox inadvertently did Clinton a favour, giving him a venue in which he could convincingly crush ABC’s fictionalized Path to 9/11 broadcast.
There are people in this thread who say Clinton lost his cool. I’m not seeing it, and I’d like them to cite timings in the video when they think this has occurred.