The nation’s pundits are surmising in their whiz-kid way that General Clark’s candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination has been instigated by some mysterious stratagem devised by the Clintons. I suppose the thing is possible. Yet a more plausible explanation for this glamorous candidacy is that the telegenic general has been inspired by the California gubernatorial campaign of Arianna Huffington. She is an inspiration to all such luminaries of the Kultursmog. Watch for the general to come down hard on SUVs, as Ms. Huffington has, and to sniff at “big money in politics,” as Ms. Huffington has from her Hollywood redoubt.

When it was discovered a short while back that Ms. Huffington had only paid $771 in federal taxes over the past two years, despite having taken her former husband for millions in divorce court, I had expected her to plead that such was the plight of a single-parent mom under kapitalism — and she did. In his first week as a Democratic candidate, General Clark has shown himself to be a ham on the same sublime plain as his model Ms. Huffington. Out there in California when Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy, Ms. Huffington, then already a candidate, wandered dreamily up to him and knocked his microphones over. My guess is that it is only a matter of time before Howard Dean is similarly accosted by the drop-dead beautiful General Clark. On cable news the other day one of New York magazine’s taste potentates confided that one of General Clark’s imperishable political assets is that in “small groups” he is “funny.” It is an indication of the essential frivolousness of the Kultursmog that its intellectualoids recommend a general who is “funny” for the presidency. Did anyone ever say General Grant was funny, or General Eisenhauer, who, by the way, was the rare general who proved to be a tolerably good politician?

The Kultursmog is the media culture that dominates American politics and tastes except when elections are held. It is polluted by liberal politics and values. It allows for such politically negligible figures as General Clark to become persons of moment. Come to think of it, Ms. Huffington’s eminence owes much to the Kultursmog.

My guess is that the air is going to go out of the general’s candidacy rather soon. Perhaps it will be reported that the handsome general served briefly after his retirement from the army as an underwear model for Calvin Klein. Or he will bomb on the Bill Maher television show trying to match his exemplar Ms. Huffington’s hairstyle.

Seriously, General Clark, like most generals, has a low opinion of politicians, which he has already demonstrated to the peril of his brief campaign. Generals are usually impatient with the tug and pull of politics. General Clark, who reportedly once voted for President Nixon and President Reagan, has had a fleeting friendship with President Clinton. Now he seems to think all politicians are liars. He has taken the measure of the Democratic field (which has a large number of liars) and concluded that he can compete with it easily in terms of posturing and mendacity. Within a matter of weeks he has told at least three lies and been caught out every time. Mr. Clinton can get by with that kind of a record, but not a retired general.

There was his false claim that the White House importuned on him to link the September 11 terrorists to Iraq. Then he revised his assertion, claiming that it was a Canadian “think tank” that importuned on him. The think tank could not be identified. Then he told supporters that he would have voted for entering the Iraq war. When that upset some of them he reversed himself saying he “never” would have voted for the war. Finally there is the flap over Karl Rove. General Clark claims that after September 11, Mr. Rove repeatedly failed to return calls to him from the general. Mr. Rove has no record of such calls.

What are we to make of the fantasy that is the presidential campaign of General Clark? My suggestion is that the liberals have finally found their very own General Douglas MacArthur. That “old soldier” who told us that such venerable figures “never die; they just fade away” aroused derision and horror from the liberals in the early 1950s.This one wanted to put massive numbers of troops in Kosovo in the 1990s and to fire on a Russian contingent a decade after the Cold War had ended. Now he tells us we have acted imprudently in liberating Iraq and sobering up the Middle East where terrorists not long ago thought they could attack America with impunity. He would have us act there today as President Clinton acted in the 1990s, setting the stage for more fury against America in the future. He will in time fade away, but his mighty rise in the liberals’ esteem demonstrates their desperation.

STOP!! right there!

In the first place, this "guy" is NOT a REAL GENERAL.

He is an product of a Bill Clinton bowel movement that emerged during said socialist emperor's reign of terror over the United States military (approximately EIGHT LONG YEARS).

This GENERAL PAIN IN THE ASS was nothing more than an instrument in the hands of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party to impliment SOCIAL ENGINEERING beginning on the "captured" audience of our military.

Their plan didn't work then, and if anybody knows squat about our military, General Pain Clark, Bill Clinton, or the Democraps, they know this much.

Who is Genral Clark?

This is the very sam SOB who sat silent during the (attempted) raping, stealing, and plundering of our U.S. Servicemen and Women's ABSENTEE BALLOT RIGHT TO VOTE!!

The Military Have A VOTE!?? I Diddunt Know Dat!!

Gore Confers With Gen. Clark

Democrap Military Ballot Box

Democrats See Gen Clark As A Prize

Wesley Clark: General Issues (The Weasel)

You may be interested to know that this statement from Mr. Tyrell:

"There was his false claim that the White House importuned on him to link the September 11 terrorists to Iraq. Then he revised his assertion, claiming that it was a Canadian “think tank” that importuned on him. The think tank could not be identified."

Is a falsehood. In the most charitable terms, it can be said that the assertion was "borrowed" by editorialist Tyrell from his obvious superior, George Will, who in turn (again, charitably) "mistakenly" created the original lie... I mean "error on the side of conservatism" through creative editing.

According to the transcript of Meet the Press, as reprinted in http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh092303.shtml , this was the dialogue between Clark and his interviewer, Tim Russert:

***

CLARK: I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.

RUSSERT: By who? Who did that?

CLARK: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, “You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.” I said, “But—I’m willing to say it but what’s your evidence?” And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had—Middle East think tanks and people like this, and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn’t talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection.

***

George Will chose to categorize the conversation in these terms:

***

WILL (8/31/03): As Clark crisscrosses the country listening for a clamor for him…he compounds the confusion that began when he said on June 15 that on 9/11 “I got a call at my home” saying that when he was to appear on CNN, “You’ve got to say this is connected” to Iraq. “It came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over.” But who exactly called Clark?

July 1: “A fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank.” There is no such Canadian institution.

***

(Good luck finding Will's editorial on www.washingtonpost.com . I'm sure it's there, somewhere. But you can find it apparently plagiarized here: http://www.daily-journal.com/content/?id=33838 )

Clark didn't say he got a call from the White House. When people with poor reading and listening skills (none of whom read this board, I am sure) reported that he did, he clarified it, saying that the call came from a Middle East think tank in Canada.

That did not stop George Will or William Safire from unequivocably stating that there is no such think tank in Canada. And in a piss-poor journalistic sense, there isn't, since the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies of Montreal doesn't have a presence on the Internet. Possibly as a result, Will's so-called researchers weren't inclined to check with its the Centre's founder, Thomas Hecht, who told the Toronto Star that he placed the call to Clark himself. See:

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1063836611999

That, by the way, was a full week before your glorified blogger Mr. Tyrell wrote his misinformed opinion piece.

In keeping with the tradition of selling untruth as fact for the purpose of discrediting its enemies, the conservatives have sought to paint General Clark as a liar. In doing so, they themselves have--perhaps willingly--passed on lies. And so the conservative wing of America remains inextricably linked with the decidedly un-Christian practices of lies, deceit, and manipulation.

I defy any honest person to categorize this latest snipe against Clark as anything but poor journalism. And lest one is inclined to take the "American people are simple, so you have to put it in the simplest of terms" argument, I look forward to seeing you wriggle through the coil of deceit through repetition which continues to perpetuate after this particular allegation was definitively put to bed.

Shake it off, ignorant political mudslingers, or you just might wind up in yet another hell, one run by yet another plastic politician from Arkansas.

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