won’t you marry me, bill

I confess, I have had a crush on Bill Clinton since I was in the 5th grade.  Bill, if you’re reading this, maybe you remember me, we’ve met twice:  we shook hands at the SantaCaliGon Days festival in Independence, Missouri on Labor Day 1992, and I was at your first inauguration in.  I was the smitten 11 year old standing near the back of the crowd of 120,000 people – maybe you saw me? 

Bill has recently given me a great reason to renew my schoolgirl crush.  In an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday last week, Bill was asked why he didn’t do more to catch Osama bin Laden.  And for the rest of the 15 minute interview Bill just reamed Wallace.  First he blasted him for not asking this type of question to anyone in the Bush administration, then went through a laundry list of things he had done to try to track down and kill bin Laden, dating back to 1998 following the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and picking up after the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen.  He was criticized for years by neocons calling him “obsessed” with bin Laden.  His top security advisor, Richard Clarke (who worked for Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2) was demoted after Clinton left office.  So Bill gets up in Wallace’s face with all of this information, really lets him have it with a stream of information punctuated by Wallace’s occasional interjections of “But…” and “wait a minute, sir.” 

Oh but Bill, the big sweetie,  managed to be humble and loveable while still totally in attack mode.    Humble: “I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it. But I did try.”  Attack:  “That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try.”

Remember when we had a president who was charming and well spoken?  To say nothing of intelligent and capable?  Bill, I love you now more than ever.

 ___________________

Want to watch the interview?

part 1:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBwrqcgfEXI

part 2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNoN403tXU4

Or read it?

http://thinkprogress.org/clinton-interview