Third Way Dispatch

I have to admit, I was dumfounded – at first – by the Roger Clemens hearing. It wasn’t the nanny issue and the Jose Canseco party. It wasn’t the HGH injection for Madame Clemens for the SI swimsuit edition (note to self: get HGH for 20 year grad school reunion in May.). No, it was the unexpected partisan breakdown. I mean, this looked like the Alito hearings. The Republicans were with the Rocket; Democrats were against him. The Republicans thought Roger was telling the truth; Democrats thought he was lying.

But more than that – Republicans were like groupies trying to get an autographed ball. They were holding up pictures, asking him what insignia he would wear on his Hall of Fame plaque (how about $$$?), hell – they were fawning over him. It didn’t matter that everyone else McNamee fingered in the Mitchell report fessed up. Never mind that Mrs. Rocket admitted to using HGH. Never mind that Andy Pettitte said Clemens spoke to him about juicing. The Republicans circled the wagons around Roger like he was Alberto Gonzalez.

That’s when it hit me – he was Alberto Gonzalez! If you’ve trained yourself to believe lies long enough – if you’ve convinced yourself that waterboarding is like using a netti pot, that Saddam was behind 9-11, that Dick Cheney was sober when he blasted his buddy in the face with a shotgun, that George Bush really won Florida, that tax cuts really do raise revenue, and that global warming is a myth – maybe you cannot see the truth even when it sits right in front of you. All 240 pounds of bulging, weapons grade, cybernetic fallaciousness.

Chris Shays (R-Milquetoast) was particularly offensive. He spent most of his questioning trying to get McNamee to admit that he was a drug dealer. OK, Chris – connect the dots. If McNamee is indeed a drug dealer it means that someone must have been the “drug buyer.” Hey, maybe it’s the guy sitting next to him. You know, the guy who cheated his way through 4 Cy Youngs and a hundred million smackers. The guy whose wife was using the stuff. The guy whose buddy says he was using the stuff. Look, there’s a reason he ranks about 436 among the 435 members of the House.

Of course, no one wears the clown’s nose like Dan Burton (R-Pumpkin Patch). He rose from obscurity to absurdity during the lurid days following the Vince Foster suicide – firing his .38 into pumpkins in his backyard to prove that Oswald couldn’t have acted alone and that Hillary Clinton was behind the grassy knoll. His onetime lackey, David Bossie, now runs a subterranean opposition assassination firm that successfully located the black child that John McCain fathered in South Carolina in 2000. But I digress. Dan Burton literally spat at McNamee. His cheeks red, his eyes wet, his chin atremble – he called McNamee a liar three times in one sentence (“that’s a lie, that’s a lie and that’s a lie” – sound like third grade to you too?). And then he concluded with his own Burtonesque circle of illogic – “I don’t know what to believe. I know one thing I don’t believe. That’s you!” Huh? Even the Republicans on the Committee had to avert their eyes.

No one expected much out of the Clemens hearings and by that measure they still were a disappointment. Nothing is quite as pathetic as watching people who know nothing about sports, talk about sports. But in this sad spectacle I found a glimmer of understanding. If you believe the lie long enough, it starts to become the truth. I wish there was a performance enhancing drug to correct that.