Last of the pre-Google Liars

Not mine, I could only dream. No, that belongs to this commenter at Tom Maguire's house. Read the post and the discussion that follows.

Meanwhile, at RealClearPolitics Dennis Byrne weighs in with this:

Bristling at evidence that Clinton and his administration were wavering and indecisive, the letter asserted that the president aggressively tried to "take a shot at Bin Laden." It cites the 9/11 Commission Report for supposedly giving credit to Clinton for approving "every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against Bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

This is close enough to the truth to make the "I-didn't-inhale" and "I-didn't-have-sex-with-that-woman" Clinton think he can get away with it. But it is far enough away from the truth to be classified as, if not a bold lie, an artless equivocation.

As usual, Clinton figures that the rest of us are too stupid or lazy to look it up for ourselves. And having read the complete report when it came out more than two years ago, I think it is an inescapable fact that a vacillating, equivocating administration had more than one opportunity to take out terrorist mastermind Bin Laden, but blew it.

And as TM points out, plenty of folks have:

The Bill Clinton - Chris Wallace interview has brought out the fact-checkers:

Patterico finds that, contra Clinton, Fox News has asked a Bush official the same "connect the dots" questions that were put to Clinton;

Jim Geraghty at NRO pummels Clinton's notion that Osama was not part of the Somalia story;

...

MORE: Jake Tapper of ABC News sets Clinton straight on the notion that evil righties did not support his cruise missile attack into Afghanistan abd the Sudan in 1998.

But let me add this! Mr. Tapper presents the "next-day" reaction to the attacks; as questions emerged about just what target we had hit in the Sudan (pharmaceutical factory? milk factory?), critics also emerged. Chris Hitchens certainly comes to mind, as does Jimmy Carter; Clinton's defenders will want to probe a bit to support his assertion that the criticism came from the right.

This summary from Ryan Hendrickson, written in 2002, agrees with Mr. Tapper's point that the Republican leadership was on board and reinforces his point that Clinton's real problem was with the press...

So what accounts for the inaccuracies in Mr. Clinton's tirade? Was he caught up in the moment, saying what comes to mind, minus the certainty of proper research? No, that doesn't play to type.

If he were an amateur pundit (think 99.9% of bloggers for instance), I could buy that. But remember, Bill Clinton is one of the smartest men to hold the office of President in quite some time. Not to mention the fact that he was defending his policies...eight years worth in which you'd assume he's a primary actor.

So what accounts for the inaccuracies in his defense?