HA! I knew it, she just couldn't manage to make it all the way through without a deep dig at W.
PRESIDENT CLINTON has presented his survival of impeachment as a personal triumph in which the American people stood at his side in a patriotic fight against enemies of the Constitution.
President Clinton: believes historians of the future will salute his defence of the Constitution Evoking an almost heroic view of his ordeal at the hands of the Republican-controlled Congress, Bill Clinton said historians of the future would salute his defence of the Constitution. His words seemed part of an effort to shape his own political legacy. This process includes reaching out to a population which has always warmed to his personal touch, not least by his first question and answer session on an internet site.
Mr Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives in December for lying to a grand jury when he denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But Republicans in the Senate could not raise the two-thirds majority to remove him.
In an interview with ABC television, Mr Clinton said: "I think that history will view this much differently. They will say I made a bad personal mistake, I paid a serious price for it, but that I was right to stand and fight for my country and my constitution and its principles, and that the American people were very good to stand with me." He put the Lewinsky scandal in the context of other investigations into his conduct, like the Whitewater development deal in Arkansas.
He said: "I made a personal mistake and they spent $50 million trying to ferret it out because they had nothing else to do, because all the other charges were totally false, bogus, made up, and people were persecuted because they wouldn't commit perjury against me. I think that over the long run, the fact that we accomplished as much as we did in the face of the most severe, bitter partisan onslaught . . . will, in a way, make many of the things we achieve seem all the more impressive."
When he appeared on the Web via George Washington University, Mr Clinton likened his internet debut to the "fireside chats" that Franklin Roosevelt held with the American people on the radio, or John F Kennedy's first televised press conferences. Asked by "Mark of England" if he wished he could serve a third term, something prohibited in the constitution, he said: "I love this job and I would continue to do it if I could."
With an online audience of 50,000, he told another questioner that he thought his legacy would be "a time of transformation, hope, of genuine opportunity, a time when we deepened the bonds of freedom".