Whitlock rips him a new one. No link...received via e-mail: Clemens fighting to save his butt ... kissers By Jason Whitlock Award-winning Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock brings his thought-provoking style to FOXSports.com on a weekly basis. Updated: February 11, 2008, 1:18 PM EST If Roger Clemens is lying — which I tend to believe he is — then his major crime is being unable to imagine a life worth living without constant, pervasive fan adulation. Seriously, if the guy isn't telling the truth, all he's really fighting for is the right to show up in any restaurant in America and get a table without waiting, a round of drinks on the house and some groupie telling him he's the greatest. He's a crackhead, a celebrity addicted to human lips resting on the crack of his/her rear end. And, as we know, crackheads do dumb stuff, like spend a week in the nation's capital whining and dining lying politicians, begging them to believe that the game's greatest pitcher took B-12 shots in the butt, not steroids. No one, and I mean no one, lies more frequently and boldly than a crackhead in search of his next hit/kiss of the rear. It took video evidence to get former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry to admit he hit the pipe and 14,000 text messages for Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to acknowledge he hit his fine-ass chief of staff. And you think Roger "Pookie" Clemens is going to crack because Brian McNamee has a couple of pictures, a few dirty syringes and blood-stained gauze? Hell, Monica Lewinsky had the president's happy ending splattered on her favorite Sunday dress and Clinton never copped. No, Roger is not going to give up his life of self- and fan-worship without an ugly, desperate fight. Say what you want about Barry Bonds, but if he turned to the needle, he did it solely to dominate the game, keep pace with McGwire and Sosa and help the Giants win games. Bonds couldn't care less what anybody outside his immediate circle thinks about him. Roger, it appears, is consumed with image. He's worried about what guys like Bob Costas think. Roger wants to give Costas, Lupica and all the other baseball-is-America keepers of the faith a reason to believe Roger is better than Barry. Costas sold that line of garbage on Bill Maher's HBO talk show last week. Somehow Costas argued that Brian McNamee's sworn statements about rear-ending Roger and his wife with HGH was less compelling evidence than the gossipy book "Game of Shadows." Maher, even more incredibly, bought Costas' line of (spit) and argued that jealousy motivated McNamee's testimony. And you thought Johnnie Cochran was a slick lawyer. Clemens has his own Dream Team of attorneys and media groupies. Why would any sane, rational, free-of-bias person believe McNamee is lying? He told the truth about Andy Pettitte. Why risk incarceration and lie on Clemens and his wife? On Thursday, Clemens' attorneys compared McNamee and his allegations to Duke lacrosse. Well, we know why the Duke hooker lied. She was drunk, high, embarrassed and, according to what we learned later, prone toward making up rape allegations when the mood struck her. McNamee, as far as we know, was prone toward helping athletes cut corners to get big and strong and under threat of indictment when he fingered Pettitte and Clemens to the feds. The only way McNamee could win an all-expenses-paid trip to the Big House was by, for instance, falsely accusing the greatest pitcher in baseball of using human growth hormone and other drugs. McNamee had no incentive to exaggerate or lie. And I don't care that he might have gotten a detail wrong about seeing Clemens at a Jose Canseco party. There's a huge difference between remembering who was at a party and recalling puncturing Debbie Clemens' firm booty. Grown men don't lie on their needles. The former cop (the absolute last person who would want to go to jail) had every incentive to tell the whole truth. Let's say McNamee had simply squealed on Pettitte and left Clemens' name out of the Mitchell Report. McNamee would've opened himself up to Pettitte alleging that McNamee protected Clemens and wasn't completely forthright with investigators. McNamee lying makes no sense. Pookie twisting the truth makes perfect sense. Clemens doesn't want his life to change. He's addicted to being the most important and celebrated man in Texas. A steroids conviction in the court of public opinion would sentence him to a life outside the spotlight, a life Mark McGwire intelligently chose. I guess, in Clemens' mind, McGwire might as well be O.J. Simpson. Clemens is wrong. White folks can't wait to forgive Clemens. All he needed to do was offer the same kind of half-hearted apology Jason Giambi gave. A momentary show of contrition and the steroid witch hunters would've returned to their primary mission of tar and feathering Barry Bonds. Right now, the masses are upset with Clemens because he's turned attention away from Bonds by claiming innocence and glad-handing congressmen. The witch hunters never wanted to burn Clemens at a stake. You never heard them talk about Clemens' hat size, muscle growth, physique change and career resurrection with the kind of passion and righteous indignation they discussed Bonds. No, Clemens and McNamee were celebrated for their work ethic. For years we've been shown pictures of a 21-year-old Bonds juxtaposed against the 40-year-old Bonds. This is supposed to be undeniable proof that Barry did steroids. I've never seen one ESPN show do a similar picture graphic of Clemens. Roger has screwed this whole thing up, turned a Giambi situation into a Pete Rose situation. Clemens should've said he tried it a few times, regrets doing it and wants to be forgiven. Yeah, he would've had to wait a few years to enter the Hall of Fame and wait a few minutes to get a table at a couple of restaurants, but eventually all lips would've returned to his rear end.
