Reply #131: Damn....I should be getting paid at this point...

[FrenchieCat]

late night must bring the extremists out. Thank God, I'm on the pacific coast!

He was JOKING! But like you, the PNACers took it seriously...and busted it all. This is so damn tired, it's not even funny.

Really, really digging, uh?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/old/sept0304.html
Clark told Fineman he had just been kidding around. But Owens and Holtzman assured Fineman that Clark was dead serious.

Now, Owens is a Republican and he's close to Karl Rove and President Bush. So I don't think you've got to use your imagination too creatively to see what agenda Owens might be advancing -- especially since the story doesn't really add up on several other counts as well.

However that may be, this afternoon The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti chimes in with a quick bit of investigative reporting.
Continetti goes on to say that "this isn't the general's first whopper Clark's latest tale bears little resemblance to reality," trying, to true to form, to nail down the Clark as fabulist meme -- a la Al Gore and every other Democratic presidential candidate.

But wait a second. Do you see the problem here? Right. Clark isn't the one who's saying he put in calls to Karl Rove. Owens and Hotzman are saying it.

So to the extent this means anything -- and that's highly debatable -- it discredits them, not him.

In other words, the canard floated by one group of Rove's pals on day one gets shot down by another group of his friends on day two. Like I said, journalistic friendly fire on the right.

To my friends at the Standard I can only say that the next time you put something like this together on the fly you might want to hash it out with a Venn Diagram or a flow chart or something before you go to press.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum asks an awfully good question about how the White House suddenly became so forthcoming about phone record searches.


http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/152tuawi.asp
Clark Never Called Karl
Wesley Clark says he would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his phone calls. White House phone logs suggest otherwise.
by Matthew Continetti
09/22/2003 1:45:00 PM
WHEN WILL Wesley Clark stop telling tall tales? In the current issue of Newsweek, Howard Fineman reports Clark told Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and University of Denver president Mark Holtzman that "I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls."

Unfortunately for Clark, the White House has logged every incoming phone call since the beginning of the Bush administration in January 2001. At the request of THE DAILY STANDARD, White House staffers went through the logs to check whether Clark had ever called White House political adviser Karl Rove. The general hadn't. What's more, Rove says he doesn't remember ever talking to Clark, either.

This isn't the general's first whopper. Last June, the latest Democratic candidate for president implied that he "got a call" on 9/11 from "people around the White House" asking the general to publicly link Saddam Hussein to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Last August, Clark told a Phoenix radio station that "The White House actually back in February apparently tried to get me knocked off CNN and they wanted to do this because they were afraid that I would raise issues with their conduct of the war."