Tom Shales

You imply that Chris Wallace got want he deserved for "violating the ground rules". Since when do former Presidents or current Presidents for that matter get to set unbreakable "ground rules". I suspect you would be one of the first to squeal like a pig if President Bush set "ground rules" at an interview and starting jabbing a finger at you when you asked a tough question. Just to let you know, if you do that in a bar with another guy that usually get you a smack in the mouth, but I'm sure you know that,.

The very spectacle of a former President of these here United States telling a network journalist that he had a smirk on his face and turning purple with rage when he was asked a legitimate question is mind numbing, except to you. I would suspect that you enjoyed it cause you're a bedwetting liberal but I'm also sure you would deny that you have any political leanings at all. Why is it when a person who is not fetted by the liberal media complains of rude behavior he/she is a crybaby but if one of your own is put upon, the other person is a bully. Can you imagine what would have happened if Chris Wallace had poked the President, the Secret Service would have thrown him to the floor and hauled him in, but President Clinton can assault a journalist without fear of reprisal. Hell, President Clinton could probably get away with rape.

Oh, let me add a note to Mr. Golden's comment. He prodded Mr Shales with, "Since when do former Presidents or current Presidents for that matter get to set unbreakable “ground rules”. I believe the answer to be 1992. Gov Clinton, the candidate for President, laid out the ground rules - all questions had to be OK'd in advance - before he would submit to a network interview. For the life of me, I believe it was Phil Donahue? Who ever it was, was on record of being absolutely shocked. Well, we know since then that Clinton and team never believed in freedom of the press.

Wallace was way to easy on Bill Clinton. The problem is that Clinton is never challenged by the media - well, OK the one time he pissed them off an shook his finger in their face lying about Monica - but of couse even then the media was all too pleased to have carried Hillary's lie about the vast right wing conspiracy making the whole story up. By the way - how come Clinton's close association with James Raidy, a man who visted Clinton in the White House many times, and who took home the record fine ($8.6 million - and expelled) ever handed out by the US Justice Department (Clinton's Justice Department) for campaign sleeze and conspiracy was not news? How come his name is not a household name? How come only 3% of Americans know about the historic (Clinton's words) $15 billion HIV/Aids program which Bush pushed for, passed and funded (and is achieving results)? How come the media never challenged Clinton with making up a 200,000 count genocide (final np. is about 6,000 - sadly enough) in Kosovo, to sell a US led war that the Pople, Mandela, Jimmy Carter and Susan Sarandon condemned?

Let's talk about the disaster Clinton left our country in, economically. Oh, I don't really blame Clinton, any more than any other admin (I'm not a biased angry fool like most in the media), but we should all know, that it Bush would have left the downside of the corrupt greedy mess of the 90's to a Democrat, the media would have never stopped blaming them for it - Yup - we've been there before.

Imagine how Clinton would act if he had to experience a single day of questions (attacks by the media) as does Pres. Bush. With that in mind, I had one more question for Clinton - one that the media had an obligation to ask of him and never did. I offer it here.

Journalist: Mr. Clinton. We know how you and your party like to gloat over the good economic times that your leadership brought us. But according to a well known and respected liberal economist (the LA Times often turns to him), your good times were nothing more than a cheap trick played out on a gullible and willing common folk. Of course, this is simply good common sense. What's most interesting here, Pres. Clinton, is that your supporters deeply oppose this kind of an economy - yet the media has convinced them, this time, that corrupt capitalism gone mad is a grand thing. A well respected economist, Mr. Dean Baker of the CEPR, certainly no friend of the conservatives, explained it this way:"

"Even the most cursory review of the data shows that the "new economy" was mostly hype. For the business cycle as a whole, the average GDP growth rate of 3.1 percent was much lower than in the fifties and sixties, and even slightly below the pace of the seventies. Real wage growth averaged less than half a percentage point annually for a typical worker. "

"Furthermore, it was an enormous failure of public policy, not to warn people about the stock market bubble that created this situation. At a macro level, it will be difficult to again pump up the economy in the wake of the collapsing bubble. At the individual level, millions of households now find themselves with insufficient savings to pay for their retirement or their children's education."

"The stock market bubble created a huge amount of unpredicted wealth, which has quickly dissipated. Millions of families have been hurt as a result."

"Mr. Clinton, what do you have to say to these millions of Americans whose families were devastated by your leadership, and your hubris in the moment?"

"Mr. Clinton, Sir, Sir.. just what is it with that finger of yours?"

Sincerely,

Gary
Los Angeles, CA 90066

Well. at least you didn't call Chris Wallace a monkey, like that barking moonbat over at MISSNBC did. But get real: Clinton was asked a tough but legitimate question, and he wigged out. And Wallace isn't crying over the interview; he was pretty much amazed by the whole thing.

You are nothing but a liberal kook, clinton was the crybaby, he went out of bounds, all Wallace tried to do was get back to asking him about the money he raised, and clinton as usual shook his finger in his face which proves he was lying through his teeth, when he shakes that finger in your face as he did when he LIED to the american people about never knowing monica , remember ?????? so get off your liberal pedestal, and be honest for a change, you know damm well if it had been BUSH on cnn, the dems. network, they would have been asking BUSH why he in only eight months did not get osama. poor clinton, FOX NEWS which by the way has the highest ratings and beats cnn, msnbc . was not nice to him, when any GOP or when BUSH is on the other networks, attack anything he says, by the way you are one of the most disgusting person I have ever heard, but then thats how dems are. KOOKS!!!!!!!!!!

Sure struck a nerve with this post, didn't you?

Divisive politics have managed to suck people into false dialogue -- with people screaming at each other from one side (Republicans/Conservatives) to the other (Democrates/Liberals). And, just like the Hatfields and McCoys it does abolutely nothing for our country. It gets people elected -- with so many votes being cast to avoid the mythical horror of the other party being in power.

Mean politics and dialogue is getting so passe. I sure hope people are ready for the political paradigm shift that is about to be delivered by the internet. The party extremes will no long be able to predominate.

Steve

What I found funny was that Clinton used the same voice and the same hand gestures that he used when he said "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewisnky." I will tell you, I was a member of DoD Intelligence Community during Clinton's reign and he had plenty of opportunities to capture or kill Bin Laden but chose not to. A foreign government offered to take Bin Laden out but Clinton would not allow it. He lied on Fox on Sunday just like he lied about Lewinsky, and even used the same body language and voice to do it. We tied Bin Laden to the Khobar Towers bombing in 1995 so he can't argue he had no evidence.

I love it when people write hysterically vehement condemnations accusing other people of being hysterically vehement. One reader asks if Clinton would ever survive the sort of grueling interrogations that George W. Bush is put through. Huh? Here's a scoop: Clinton was president himself for eight years!!! Imagine that. And as president he generally made himself more accessible to "the media" than the current chief executive, who notoriously holds few press conferences (one of them virtually scripted in advance). Of course you can be accessible and still lie until your nose grows, as Clinton did (and I swear his nose really did get bigger during his tenure in office), but let's not be silly and say that Bush faces tougher questioning than Clinton got. Over the years I've received plenty of angry mail from both liberals and conservatives, but I have to say no liberal ever called me obscene names or threatened me. A defense of Dan Rather during one of his many controversial episodes prompted one reader in the Pacific Northwest to dash off a note saying I deserved to "get AIDS and die" for what I had written. That's not exactly enlightened discourse. I probably should have forwarded the note to the FBI.

Mr. Shales,

I noted that you responded to a point I'd made. I'd challenge you to put a few interviews, conducted by national media folks, like Russert, Rather, or Larry King side by side. And think about what was going on in the world at the time. War, Genocide, scandals, lies about genocide, or WMD's (both admin.)

Read my question relating to economic issue, using Dean Baker's words, for Bill Clinton. Here, you will have a better sense of where my politics lie. The press would never ask it of him, or any other Democrat, becasue they are so biased against the other side, that they do not even have a clue as to what happenned.

And why would a liberal threaten you, when they would generally consider you to be on their side of the political spectrum. You have to look out for the conservatives.

Regards,
Gary

Gary claims that Clinton passed along an economic mess when he left office. I'm not sure what alternate reality he resides in, but Clinton's balanced budget, record surplus, strong job growth (with low unemployment) seems a pretty record to me, especially compared to today's fiscal train wreck. Under Bush's watch? The surplus has been squandered with tax cuts for people who don't need them and replaced by record deficits and out-of-control spending.

One's first step in wisdom is to kuesteon everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.