WASHINGTON - Ex-President Bill Clinton exploded yesterday when asked why he didn't get Osama Bin Laden - and revealed that he had invasion plans drawn up to topple the Taliban and get Al Qaeda. Clinton was clearly annoyed when Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace said viewers had sent e-mails urging him to ask, "Why didn't you do more to put Bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business?"

After a string of related questions, Clinton became red-faced and, in a finger-jabbbing tirade, blamed a conspiracy of media and right-wingers for trying to blame him for Bin Laden's survival.

When Wallace tried to cut in, Clinton cut him off: "You brought up the question, so you get an answer."

Clinton said that after the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in 2000, "I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and launch a full-scale attack search for Bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we [only] got after 9/11. The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that Bin Laden was responsible."

Not to give the commie pinkos at Think Progress (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) any unnecessary publicity, but they have what they claim to be the full transcript of Wallace's interview with Clinton here, even though it doesn't hit the airwaves til tomorrow. Of course, they are spinning it as Clinton Takes on Fox News -- their hero takes it to the evil conservative network. But it's the same old Clinton we've come to know and love: When backed into a corner he's unable to spin himself out of, he strikes out like a pouty brat who isn't getting his way, giving the Clinton spin damn the facts and hurling ridiculous accusations back at Wallace:

CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this…arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 911 commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

There's the right-wing neocon conspiracy to "get" Clinton. As for the so-called false claim that The Path to 9/11 was based on the 9/11 commission report, it was and no amount of repeated denials on the part of Clinton will make that not be the case. And I don't remember anyone on the right side of this issue EVER claiming Clinton did too much to fight terror. Terror attacks were occurring all over the world during the eight years he was president and he didn't do a damn thing save lobbing a couple missiles into an aspirin factory.

But there's tons more. How's this for testy:

Ok, now let’s look at all the criticisms: Black hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Bin laden had anything to do with black hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of 1993.

WALLACE: …I understand…

CLINTON: No wait…no wait…Don’t tell me. You asked me why I didn’t do more to Bin Laden. There was not a living soul…all the people who criticized me wanted to leave the next day. You brought this up so you get an answer.

Hey Slick: No one is saying that bin Laden was single-handedly responsible for every single terror attack that happened on your watch. But with buildings and helicopters and boats and planes exploding all around us -- some on our soil -- and the bodies of our brave Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a bunch of scraggly, half-starved Somalis, it was YOUR DUTY as the president of the United States to deal with those issues and YOU DIDN'T -- PERIOD!

But is gets better. This is in the middle of an exchange where Clinton is accusing Wallace of being a right-winger who doesn't ask tough questions of Bush Administration officials:

WALLACE: About the USS Cole?

CLINTON: tell the truth.

WALLACE: I…with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask.

CLINTON: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on Climate Change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about…

WALLACE: [laughs]

CLINTON: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.

WALLACE: But President Clinton…

CLINTON:

WALLACE: We were going to ask half the question about it. I didn’t think this was going to set you off on such a tear .

CLINTON: It set me off on such a tear because you didn’t formulate it in an honest way and you people ask me questions you don’t ask the other side.

This is perhaps why the kooks in the left-wing blogosphere love this guy so much: He has as many left-wing nutjob conspiracy theories as they do. The difference is that they are just a bunch of little, meaningless left-wing nuts ranting in the blogosphere. Clinton is a big left-wing nut -- the closest thing the Democrats have to a "leader" -- spinning his nutjob conspiracy theories on national television in an attempt to cover his ass for the sorry job he did in protecting us from terror threats.

At one point he claims Bush has had 24 years to find bin Laden:

CLINTON: I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could. The entire military was against sending special forces in to Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise…We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible while I was President. Until I left office. And yet I get asked about this all the time and they had three times as much time to get him as I did and no one ever asks them about this. I think that’s strange.

Let's see: Clinton was in office for eight years; a terror attack on our soil occurred one month into his presidency. Bush has been president for five and a half years and has been fighting terror ever since 9/11, about eight months after the start of his presidency. Perhaps Clinton isn't very good at math, because last time I checked Bush hadn't been in office for 24 years but that would be the implication in his "three times as much time" quote.

It's blatantly obvious to anyone who between Clinton and Bush took the terror threat more seriously. That would be the guy who is in the middle of fighting a global War on Terror right now and having the standard-bearers of Clinton's party fight him at every turn. All Clinton's bluster, yelled accusations, lies, half-truths and righteous indignation can't hide this simple fact: The only thing Clinton did in regards to terror on his watch was to ignore the threat and Chris Wallace struck a nerve by simply asking questions the vast majority of us would like answers to. We didn't get any answers: Just one pissed off Bubba.