I don’t want to belabor the point, but Bill Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace — the former president’s first-ever chat with Fox News — has become one of the more interesting political showdowns in quite a while.<\/p>\n
If you were out of the loop over the weekend, Clinton sat down with Wallace, ostensibly to discuss the Clinton Global Initiative. As this video<\/a> and this transcript<\/a> demonstrate, the interview became a heated discussion about Clinton’s counter-terrorism efforts as president.<\/p>\n Some of Clinton’s far-right critics have suggested that the former president somehow lost his cool. Nonsense. Watch the clip<\/a>. Clinton certainly felt strongly<\/em> about the subject at hand, but his responses were forceful and factual. Every word was not only true, but an assertive, detailed response to conservative propaganda.<\/p>\n Indeed, Clinton’s office had some good advice<\/a> to Dems who caught the interview.<\/p>\n “CGI is a nonpartisan event, and so we thought it would be fair to do Fox News Sunday… When Wallace hid behind his viewers and attacked President Clinton’s record on terror, President Clinton fought back hard, just like any Democrat should when they are attacked with a baseless attack,” said Clinton spokesman Jay Carson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Note referred<\/a> to this today as the “Chappaqua Hint,” meaning that Clinton’s forceful response was meant “to set an example for how [Clinton aides] want the party to behave between now and Election Day.”<\/p>\n I can only hope so. * From today’s Progress Report<\/a>:<\/p>\n Clinton pressed Wallace on why he had never asked the Bush administration why it demoted Clarke. Wallace claimed “we asked” and shot back, “a href=”http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/clinton-interview”>Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday, sir?” In fact, a Progress Report analysis found that, since 2001, Wallace has interviewed the top national security officials from the Bush administration — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley — 42 times<\/a>. According to a Lexis-Nexis database search, he never asked any of them why Clarke was demoted, nor did he ask why they failed to respond to the USS Cole attack<\/a>. Days after it was revealed that President Bush had received a President’s Daily Brief that said “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.<\/a>,” Wallace did not even bring it up<\/a> in an interview with former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nA few other Clinton v. Wallace notes to consider:<\/p>\n