(2006-09-26) — The morning after Fox News aired reporter Chris Wallace’s interview with a feisty Bill Clinton, the former president today said, “Right-wing, neocon conspiracy theorists are out to get me.”

Mr. Clinton dismissed allegations that he appeared paranoid on TV, saying, “people who call me paranoid are the exact same right-wingers, who worked behind the scenes with Chris Wallace to engineer my emotional outburst. It’s what they call a ‘wag the finger’ strategy to distract attention from the Bush administration’s foreign policy failures.”

The remark follows Mr. Clinton’s vigorous defense of his administration’s virtual assassination of al Qaeda leader Usama Bin Laden. Indeed, a spokesman for Mr. Bin Laden confirmed that during the Clinton administration, the al Qaeda leader felt “nearly threatened.”

The recent ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, a new book called “The Looming Tower,” and Mr. Wallace’s smirking during the interview provide more evidence, he said, of the “conservative hit job” orchestrated by White House adviser Karl Rove.

Experts agreed that the most important question raised by the Wallace-Clinton interview is whether the former president’s frequent references to a book on 9/11 by former counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke can push its sales past the Noam Chomsky book recommended last week by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the United Nations.