The Previous Prez--UPDATED

Bill Clinton's been making the rounds a fair amount lately. Sure, he's been stumping for a few Democrats in the run up to the election, but he's also building the Clinton Global Initiative to focus philanthropy to better address the world's problems. Joe Conason wrote about it yesterday in Salon, and according to The New York Times, he raised $7.3 billion in pledged donations. Clinton's eager to talk about this anywhere he can, so he even taped an interview with FOX News Sunday. As you might imagine, that didn't go as smoothly as he may have hoped. Chris Wallace asked him about bin Laden (because his fans demanded it, he insists), and Clinton took on the whole right-wing media machine. Think Progress got their hands on a rough transcript, and it looks like he made his point fairly effectively.

We'll have to see what happens in the morning, though. FOX claims they're going to run the interview in complete and unedited form, but (also from Think Progress), earlier today, they were hyping it on their Website as "Clinton Gets Crazed" (the headline was changed to "Strong Reaction" when I checked it while writing this post). Maybe it'll be an "eye of the beholder" thing. Wallace was on FOX News today promoting the interview, and (according to a transcript at Raw Story, he suggested that the question had caught Clinton off guard: "And I've got to say, Brian... you know, you figure he would be prepared to deal with that. He went off. He just... he started talking." Talking in response to a question--that is unusual. Here's more from Wallace: "It wasn't baiting. It wasn't, I think, even antagonistic. And he just seemed set off." We can all see for ourselves soon.

UPDATE--The video is up in a couple of places: Crooks and Liars has the first part of the interview, and Think Progress has a more abbreviated version. Clinton comes across to me as full of righteous anger, and many in the left blogosphere are giddy. I think it speaks for itself, and that may be reflected in the fact that it seems it's taken the right until mid-Sunday afternoon to get their talking points in order. I kept checking Technorati and Google Blog Search, and although there were a few brave wingers willing to go on the record, it's only in the last hour or two that they've come out en masse with terms such as meltdown and unhinged. It may be telling, though, that in my (completely unscientific) review, left bloggers seem much more eager to link to the actual video than right bloggers do.