O’Reilly vs. Soderberg
The highlight of tonight’s O’Reilly Factor was watching Bill stop Nancy Soderberg dead in her spinning tracks. Here’s a taste of her spin:
Bill: Of course things are complicated. That’s why Clinton didn’t get bin Laden.
Soderberg: Now wait a minute Bill. This is a no spin factor. Clinton acted actually acted against preemptively repeatedly against bin Laden including taking out a chemical weapons factory in Sudan.
Bill: Nancy look. If you want to believe that President Clinton did everything he could to neutralize bin Laden and al Qaida as they were openly operating in Afghanistan with all our satellite intelligence saw what they were doing. If you want to believe that, you’re free to do that. But it isn’t true. No serious analyst believes that. And that’s the record. So this is a no spin zone.
OUCH. That’s what happens when you try rewriting history on Bill’s show. I can’t imagine that there’s many people who’d agree with Soderberg that Bill Clinton acted pre-emptively on any military actions against bin Laden. There’s no evidence to validate that perspective. Quite frankly, I’d gladly give Clinton credit had he eliminated al Qaida and bin Laden before the 9/11 plot came together.
Quite honestly, I was thinking about changing channels right after Talking Points but I quickly changed that thinking after I heard that Soderberg was one of his guests. I first wrote about Soderberg when she was embarassed by Jon Stewart when she appeared on the Daily Show to promote her book “The Superpower Myth”.
Here’s that lame exchange:
Stewart: This book, it talks about the superpower myth of the U.S. There’s this idea, the U.S. is the sole superpower, & I guess the premise of the book is we can’t misuse that power, have to use it wisely, & not just punitively. Is that–
Soderberg: That’s right. What I argue is that the Bush administration fell hostage to the superpower myth, believing that because we’re the most powerful nation on earth, we were all-powerful, could bend the world to our will & not have to worry about the rest of the world. I think what they’re finding in the second term is, it’s a little bit harder than that, & reality has an annoying way of intruding.
Stewart: But what do you make of, here’s my dilemma, if you will. I don’t care for the way these guys conduct themselves, & this is just you & I talking, no cameras here [audience laughter]. But boy, when you see the Lebanese take to the streets & all that, & you go, “Oh my God, this is working,” & I begin to wonder, is it, is the way that they handled it really, it’s sort of like, “Uh, OK, my daddy hits me, but look how tough I’m getting.” You know what I mean? Like, you don’t like the method, but maybe, wrong analogy, is that, uh–?
Soderberg: Well, I think, you know, as a Democrat, you don’t want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, & you don’t want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen. I think the way to look at it is, they don’t get credit for every good thing that happens, but they need to be able to manage it. I think what’s happening in Lebanon is great, but it isn’t necessarily directly related to the fact that we went into Iraq militarily.
Stewart: Do you think that the people of Lebanon would have had, sort of, the courage of their conviction, having not seen, not only the invasion but the election which followed? It’s almost as though that the Iraqi election has emboldened this crazy, something’s going on over there. I’m smelling something.
Soderberg: I think partly what’s going on is the country next door, Syria, has been controlling them for decades, & they [the Syrians] were dumb enough to blow up the former prime minister of Lebanon in Beirut, & they’re, people are sort of sick of that, & saying, “Wait a minute, that’s a stretch too far.” So part of what’s going on is they’re just protesting that. But I think there’s a wave of change going on, & if we can help ride it though the second term of the Bush administration, more power to them.
Stewart: Do you think they’re the guys to, do they understand what they’ve unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they’d just come out at the very beginning & said, “Here’s my plan: I’m going to invade Iraq. We’ll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp”, if they hadn’t done the whole “nuclear cloud,” you know, if they hadn’t scared the pants off of everybody, & just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I’d almost, I’d have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.
Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process, they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians & the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole–
Stewart: This could be unbelievable!
Soderberg:—series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which, it may well work. I think that, um, it’s–
Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He’s got, you know, here’s–
Soderberg: It’s scary for Democrats, I have to say.
Stewart: He’s gonna be a great, pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, “Reagan was nothing compared to this guy.” Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.
Soderberg: Well, there’s still Iran & North Korea, don’t forget. There’s hope for the rest of us.
Stewart:[crossing fingers] Iran & North Korea, that’s true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it’s, it is, I absolutely agree with you, this is, this is the most difficult thing for me to, because, I think, I don’t care for the tactics, I don’t care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven’t seen results like this ever in that region.
Soderberg’s doing her level best to tell Stewart that Bush shouldn’t get credit for the Cedar Revolution because the Syrians were stupid to assassinate Rafiq Hariri and Bush shouldn’t get credit for Iraq because he didn’t tell us at the time that we were going to install a democracy there and because he told us that there were all these awful weapons, etc. This is spinning and high-speed tap-dancing at its finest.
Of course, that’s what people expect from a Clinton advisor. (Don’t forget that that’s what we’d have to endure if Hillary got 270 electoral votes. Scary, huh?)
On a bit of a tangent here, think about some of the people that formed the Clinton foreign policy team: Soderberg, who thinks that military might is a “myth”, Richard Holbrooke who thinks that the War on Terror “is a metaphor, not a real war, kinda like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty…” Then there’s the incomparable (some say incomprehensible) Madeleine Albright, who is far too much a realist to deal with the international ideologues that litter the global jihadists.
The Bush administration’s had some ups and downs but I’m thankful that a Clinton, Gore or Kerry administration isn’t the commander-in-chief in this clash of civilizations because this truly is a fight to the death. Consensus-building with other nations is nice but it takes a back seat to other important considerations.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing