CLINTON: So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me. What I want to know is ...

WALLACE: Well, wait a minute, sir.

CLINTON: No, wait. No, no ...

WALLACE: I want to ask a question. You don't think that's a legitimate question?

CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question, but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of.

I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked, “Why didn't you do anything about the Cole?”

I want to know how many you asked, “Why did you fire Dick Clarke?”

I want to know how many people you asked ...

WALLACE: We asked — we asked ...

CLINTON: I don't ...

WALLACE: Do you ever watch “FOX News Sunday,” sir?

CLINTON: I don't believe you asked them that.

WALLACE: We ask plenty of questions of ...

CLINTON: You didn't ask that, did you? Tell the truth, Chris.

WALLACE: About the USS Cole?

CLINTON: Tell the truth, Chris.

WALLACE: 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's supporting my work on climate change.

And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about — you said you'd spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7-billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care.

WALLACE: But, President Clinton, if you look at the questions here, you'll see half the questions are about that. I didn't think this was going to set you off on such a tear.

CLINTON: You launched it — it set me off on a tear because you didn't formulate it in an honest way and because you people ask me questions you don't ask the other side.

WALLACE: That's not true. Sir, that is not true.

CLINTON: And Richard Clarke made it clear in his testimony...

WALLACE: Would you like to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative?

CLINTON: No, I want to finish this now.

WALLACE: All right. Well, after you.

A simple Google inquiry is all it took to uncover yet another of Clinton's lies. In a fit of anger, sometimes one does not think about the veracity of accusations one is hurling, but Mr. Clinton should have thought about that before he went on national televison.

Just a simple Google is all it took.

My Tuesday class ran from 9 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. Upon exiting and walking down the hallway, I ran into a commotion near one of the computer rooms. Employees were pushing a TV into the area and soon had it turned to a very grainy CBS local affiliate.

I saw one of the World Trade Center towers, smoke billowing upward as if sourced by brimstone.

The thought was horrible: Weren't there two of those?

I asked a student what was happening.

“We're being attacked,” he answered grimly.

Chills overwhelmed me.

I called home. My mother was tearful. My brother was in the background, passing along information from Fox News. I wandered into the building foyer, theorizing. Terrorists, obviously. Perhaps masterminded by Usama bin Laden.

My brother began shouting in the background. Something about it going down.

I returned to the TV room. The image was projected on a screen.

Even more smoke rose. And the second of the two towers had already crumbled.

Students whispered. Completely confused, in the first stages of grief.

One young man was at a computer, already writing something about the experience. An email, perhaps. No ... a journal entry, I recall. I should have spoken with him. He evidently wrote his innermost thoughts, easily readable to me standing nearby. Something like, I want to do something. I want to understand this, and then I want to make the attackers pay.

My, how it all comes back.



Classes were not cancelled. They should have been.

I skipped my math class — one of the few class sessions I ever intentionally passed up.

Reactions were nearly universal. In those days, solidarity existed. People were unified in grief, and some anger.

Only later did I learn about the Pentagon crash, Flight 93 and its incredible story, and the exact nature of the attacks. Air Force One was diverted. The Capitol evacuated. Unconfirmed reports: plane hits the Capitol, plane on its way to the White House, president in D.C., president not in D.C. ...

The deaths of firefighters and New York City officers. Ash and smoke, like a volcanic avalanche, flooding through the streets. People's bodies and hair bleached with the fallout, staggering like zombies ...

I'm tearing up, now. Thought I would. Perhaps it's time to end.

Indeed ... never forget. Just because it's been half a decade doesn't mean the impact should fade.

End-of-the-world prophecies have been around almost since the beginning. Ancient prophets, like Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and John the Apostle, who wrote Revelation, laid down visions of the destruction of the world and its replacement with a peaceful, heavenly kingdom.

Many complex mathematical formulas have been solved, but not “666,” which is the “mark of the beast” foretold in Revelation. Many have guessed at its meaning, but the answer has eluded them. For those interested in the history of false and phony end times prophecy, a partial list can be found at www.isitso.org/guide/endtime.html. It makes for entertaining reading. One of my favorites is the Anabaptist preacher in the early 1500s named Hoffman who declared the end of the world would begin in 1533 and that Strassburg would be transformed into the “New Jerusalem.”

The 1991 Persian Gulf War produced a spike in end-times books and sales. Some of them flatly predicted Armageddon was upon us. Authors noted that modern Iraq is ancient Babylon and they saw the Iraq war as a possible, even probable, fulfillment of end-times prophecies. Like those before them, they were wrong. To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, “we're still here.”

Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have created an industry with their best-selling “Left Behind” book series about the Rapture and the disappearance of all Christians before the final battle of Armageddon takes place (15 titles and more than 63 million sold, which testifies to the intense interest in the subject). There is disagreement within Christian circles as to what comes first - Armageddon or the Rapture - but that can be left to those counting angels on pinheads and, for that matter, to pinheads. Whatever they decide isn't going to affect events, though it will sell books.

[. . .]

[T]he end isn't yet upon us, because too many expect it. But, as Tim LaHaye said on “Good Morning America” last week, it is still good to be prepared. Stop worrying about dates and times, though, unless you're writing a book, making a movie, or delivering a speech. In those circumstances, “prophets” can make big profits with their modern equivalent of sandwich boards that proclaim the end is near.

Do we need newspapers? No. Do we need news and journalism and an informed democracy? Of course we do. But paper? Why? Too often, I hear editors pleading to save newspapers and newsrooms as their status quo is threatened by plummeting circulation, imploding advertising, impatient shareholders, multimedia youth and the Internet. Everyone is to blame for newspapers' pickle, it seems, but the newspapers themselves.

Yet perhaps the era of newspapers as we now know them is simply over. Especially since broadcast killed competitive newspapers, they have become one-size-fits-all vehicles that cannot possibly be all things to all people; they may be convenient, but they are also inefficient and shallow compared with the depth of the Internet. Newspapers are inevitably stale next to broadcast and online. They are inefficient advertising vehicles for highly targeted sales - classifieds and very local retail. Newspapers are terribly expensive to produce and distribute in a marketplace where your competition is free.

Will blogs replace the Old Media? Of course not.

Christian Pecaut, 25, a Stanford graduate who is promoting the film at the University of California, Berkeley campus, said the film is “catchy, hip,” with an “upbeat soundtrack.”