Below The Beltway

There’s plenty of reaction already to yesterday’s hearing and the testimony of Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee.

First, ESPN’s Lester Munson notes that the hearing resulted in more problems for Clemens than McNamee:

Clemens had no solid answer for the devastating testimony and written statement from Andy Pettitte. Not only did Pettitte corroborate McNamee’s testimony about Pettitte’s use of HGH, he also established a chronology on Clemens’ statements about HGH that could lead to a perjury charge. Responding to Pettitte’s assertion that Clemens told him he used HGH, Clemens insisted on several occasions during Wednesday’s hearing that Pettitte had “misunderstood” him. He suggested that the subject of the Pettitte-Clemens conversation was the use of HGH by Clemens’ wife. Clemens even tried to interrupt committee chairman Henry Waxman to repeat his claim at the end of the hearing, and Waxman gaveled him into angry silence. The problem for Clemens is that Debbie Clemens’ use of HGH came two years after Clemens’ conversation with Pettitte. And, as Waxman explained, that means Clemens “made untrue statements in his deposition [sworn testimony to the committee last week].”

On the other hand, SI’s Michael McCann says that Clemens acquited himself well enough, even on the Pettitte issue:

When pressed by Congressman Elijah Cummings about Pettitte’s affidavit, Clemens responded with a plausible explanation: Pettitte misheard or misunderstood the context in which Clemens discussed HGH. Clemens confirmed that he and Pettitte spoke about HGH, but said that they did so in the context of Clemens knowing about three older men who used HGH and the health benefits they received. Clemens also assured Cummings that if he had told Pettitte about personally using HGH, then Pettitte, his close friend, would have spoken with Clemens about HGH before and after he used it. But he didn’t.

From that vantage point, Clemens attempted to exonerate himself without casting any doubt on Pettitte’s veracity or intentions. Indeed, Clemens assured the committee that Pettitte would remain his friend.

On the other hand, and as alluded to by Cummings in the afternoon session, Clemens’ explanation may suffer from a logical flaw: if Pettitte indeed misheard Clemens and mistakenly believed that Clemens used HGH, then why wouldn’t, as Clemens confidently predicted in the morning session, Pettitte speak with Clemens about HGH before and after he used the substance?

One plausible explanation — because Pettitte didn’t want to admit to a man who he has said was a childhood hero that he was using a banned substance.

Finally, the Washington Post’s Mike Wise thinks that Clemens is a liar:

It wasn’t just that he almost certainly lied on Capitol Hill; it was the enormity of Roger Clemens’s untruth, the Texas-size audaciousness to think that his stature in society was big enough to get away with committing perjury.

It’s the greatest pitcher of his generation believing, down deep, that regular people were too in awe of him to warrant prosecution for taking performance-enhancing drugs — the sickness of believing his own myth.

As the contradictions kept coming yesterday in the Rayburn House Office Building, Clemens came across as a megalomaniac, a habitual liar and a barrel-chested fraud. The people who believe him now seem to be either paid by Clemens, married to him or in worse denial than the Rocket himself.

He came to Capitol Hill not to swear, under oath, his innocence of being a drug cheat; Clemens came here to show America that the arrogance of the elite athlete has moved beyond our ball fields, universities and clubhouses straight into a witness chair at a congressional hearing.

Brian McNamee is no paragon of virtue; at best, he’s a drug-runner for his celebrity baseball clients, one link in a chain that tells us, emphatically, we can’t believe what we see anymore from our athletic uberhumans.

But next to the contradictory statements and flat-out whoppers told by Clemens, the former New York City cop turned shot-doctor looked and sounded like an evidence-based detective who relied on the facts as he knew them. Dispassionate, calm, maybe a little too quiet, McNamee refused to get caught up in the morality play of the baseball icon who sat a few feet from him.

The next step, waiting to see whether the perjury charges will come.