1115.org

Apparently one thoroughly ludicrous clown show at a time is not enough to sate the American public’s vast thirst for ludicrous clown shows.

So Roger Clemens carefully put on his most sincere straight face, and appeared before Congress yesterday. He told us that his erstwhile best baseball buddy Andy Pettite — who shocked and surprised everyone by testifying in an affidavit that back in 1999 or 2000, Clemens “told me that he had taken HGH” — was just plain mistaken (and is still his best buddy, of course, now and forever). (There was also some stuff about buttocks and B12, but why go there?)

Showing more contempt for the American public than even Bush has been able to muster for a long while now, Clemens offered this disingenuous explanation for his best friend and protegé’s testimony:

In 2005, Pettitte asked Clemens if he would own up to HGH use to the media. “I never told you that,” Pettite recalls Clemens telling him. “I told you that Debbie used HGH.”

Debbie is Clemens’ wife. But here’s the problem - both Clemens and McNamee agree that McNamee injected Clemens’s wife with human growth hormone. But it happened in 2003, several years after the alleged conversation.

Forget about the apparent inconsistency with facts that even Clemens does not dispute. (Because after all, Roger may suddenly remember that Debbie had been doing HGH years before McNamee showed up to do it unto her.)

Here’s what Roger Clemens wants you to believe. He told best buddy Andy Pettite that his wife had taken to using HGH, and Pettite replied: “Hey, did you see that catch way out in left field in the 6th inning?” There was simply no further discussion of the HGH admission. Pettite did not even leer or smirk, or make a boys-will-be-boys wisecrack about what she was trying to grow. Clemens made that one statement, and they moved on immediately to other things, Which is why, after 5 or 6 years, Pettite could be totally mistaken about what Clemens had said, whether he had owned up to taking it himself, or whether he had confided that his wife was taking it.

Clemens, by the way, is also indignant that people are freely accusing him of witness tampering just because he refused to let congressional investigators talk to his ex-nanny till he had got to her first (his PR people must have felt that he wasn’t looking sufficiently like a guilty man desperately — and very clumsily — trying to lie and cheat his way out of trouble):

Committee investigators asked Mr. Clemens’s lawyers for the nanny’s name on Friday but were not given her name until Monday, Mr. Waxman said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Clemens or his lawyers found the nanny over the weekend and Mr. Clemens invited her to his Houston home, Mr. Waxman said. They had not seen each other in seven years.
[…]
“Mr. Chairman, I was doing y’all a favor,” Mr. Clemens said about talking with the former nanny on Sunday. “And as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t seen this lady in a long time, she’s a sweet lady, and I wanted to get her to you.”

Clemens, of course, has no possible future in baseball anymore. Not as a player, and not in any other capacity either. But a guy who can lie like that is just wasting his time being a disgraced baseball player. He should really be running for President!

(Apart from anything else, we would then have a Grand Unified Theory of clown shows, and Grand Unified Theories are always deeply satisfying.)