Normally, I Am Able To Follow Along

However, the VRWC seems to have left me behind with the latest Clark scandal. Let's go to the Weekly Standard:

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.

Eccentric? Erratic? Weird? Whatever. But what did Howard Fineman report, anyway?

...Last January, at a conference in Switzerland, [Gen. Clark] happened to chat with two prominent Republicans, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and Marc Holtzman, now president of the University of Denver. “I would have been a Republican,” Clark told them, “if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls.” Soon thereafter, in fact, Clark quit his day job and began seriously planning to enter the presidential race—as a Democrat. Messaging NEWSWEEK by BlackBerry, Clark late last week insisted the remark was a “humorous tweak.” The two others said it was anything but. “He went into detail about his grievances,” Holtzman said. “Clark wasn’t joking. We were really shocked.”

OK, so Clark says he was kidding. The Weekly Standard checks the phone logs, and can't find a call from Gen. Clark. From this we are supposed to conclude that when he says he is kidding, he is lying, and when he says he tried to call Karl Rove, he is lying again? Is there any chance that he was just kidding, kinda like he says?

C'mon, guys - save it for my other weekly fave.

UPDATE: Well, now Andrew Sullivan re-reads Fineman, and gets the joke. But he is still not laughing.

Comments

[Tom]

Perhaps he called Mr. Rove at home or on his cell phone?

[TM]

There are certainly other possibilities. The cellphone is one; or "my calls" may have meant "I had my people call his people".

Which ties in to Fineman's story:

But when GOP friends inquired, they were told: forget it.

But with what the Weekly Standard gives us, they seem to jump to the least likely conclusion, namely, Clark lied twice.

Actually, from the Fineman story, it seems like something must have come from the Clark side - Fineman has GOP frineds being told to forget it, Karl Rove blocking them, and so on.

Which does not mean Clark or his intermediaries called Rove and said "I want to be Bush's VP in 2004". Maybe he was angling for a Jimmy Carter style loose cannon special envoy appointment, Rove checked with the Pentagon, and laughed out loud.

But it doesn't seem odd to me that an ex-general would offer to saddle up again, and it doesn't seem odd to me that Rove would not be interested.

[darline]

hi my name is Darline canzater i just want to chilling online at school.

[kim]

Oh my darline, Clementine.
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[kim]

Odd, wouldn't you say, about those phone logs?
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