On Monday’s edition of Countdown, Keith Olbermann chimes in with another Special Comment. The subject of this comment, Fox News interview of former President Bill Clinton. [View Transcript (video is also available on the MSNBC site)] I’ll quote a highlight below:
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.
For me this is a scary thing. The current administration seems to have no concept of humility. As a country we have a huge responsibility to act as true leaders in the world. We have done that in the past. We are not doing it anymore. If unchecked, we are heading to an authoritarian style of government. Slowly our supposed “freedoms” are being whittled away in the name of “security.” But are we safer from the actions of the current administration? I would say in fact that we are moving further away from a world were some sort of peace is possible. A place where instead of dividing, we as a world would be coming together.
