In The Huddle

I know its a few days old, but I have one thought on the whole Roger Clemens/Brian MacNamee deal from Wednesday.

By now you’ve heard that nobody looked good, not Clemens, not MacNamee, not Congress, nobody.

But when Indiana Republican Dan Burton started ripping into MacNamee, who is no doubt a sleazebag, I felt like things went over the line a bit and I actually started to feel bad for the drug dealer.

Burton had MacNamee’s early responses to investigators’ questions and, sure enough they didn’t add up to the final story he told in the Mitchell Report. I chalk this up to MacNamee trying to protect his clients and friends at first, before he knew the scope of the trouble he would be in if he continued lying. Eventually, he realized to save his skin he would have to tell the whole story. MacNamee admitted as much.

Instead Burton, who really came off as an obtuse bully, lit into MacNamee, essentially trying to hammer home the point that if he lied once, you can’t believe anything else he says.

At that point, a good analogy flashed into my head. Follow me on this one. Let’s say you’re cheating on your wife. She sees some signs and asks you about it. You lie and deny it.

Let’s then say, a few weeks or months go by she gets more and more evidence that you’ve been running around on her and she confronts you again, this time, there’s no way out. So you tell her everything.

Sure, you lied at first, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not telling the truth now.

I wish MacNamee had thrown that out there to explain why his answers didn’t match. It likely would have shut Burton up.

Do a little homework on Burton and you’ll see why. He’s been in public office since 1970 and has represented Indiana’s 6th district since 1982. A born-again Christian, his website claims he is one of the leading conservative voices on issues like gun control and stopping gay marriage.

Oh yeah, he also fathered a child with a staffer in 1983. I’m sure this came as news to his longtime wife Barbara, with whom he had three other kids. Yikes.

Good to see it isn’t stopping him from claiming the moral high ground though.

But that’s enough major league baseball and politics for this blog. I’m not a fan of either.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.