I have had more than one person ask me what I think of Dick Clarke. I can’t express it any better than the author of this TIME article did. (Via Daily Pundit.)

The article notes:

In several cases, the version of events provided by Clarke this week include details and embellishments that do not appear in his new book, Against All Enemies. While the discrepancies do not, on their own, discredit Clarke’s larger arguments, they do raise questions about whether Clarke’s eagerness to publicize his story and rip the Bush Administration have clouded his memory of the facts.

The “wrong answer” rejection of the memo on Iraq’s connection to 9/11 — a story which sounded exaggerated to my ears — turns out to have been embellished:

The actual response from Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, shown later in the program, read “Please update and resubmit.” On 60 Minutes, Clarke went further, saying that Bush’s deputies never showed the President the joint-agency review, because “I don’t think he sees memos that he wouldn’t like the answer.” This is pure, reckless speculation.

Yup.

In a few other instances, Clarke’s televised comments seem designed to disparage the President and his aides at all cost, omitting any of the inconvenient details — some of which appear in the pages of his book — that might suggest the White House took al-Qaeda seriously before Sept. 11.

. . . .

While Clarke claims that he is “an independent” not driven by partisan motives, it’s hard not to read some passages in his book as anything but shrill broadsides. . . .

[T]hese passages reveal the polemical, partisan mean-spiritedness that lies at the heart of Clarke’s book, and to an even greater degree, his television appearances flacking it.

Anyone who has looked at the transcript of the briefing he provided to Fox News knows that Clarke is full of it.

The existence of this transcript, of course, was stuffed by news organizations. For example, the Los Angeles Dog Trainer didn’t even mention it in their lead story about Clarke today. It was mentioned way, way down in Ronald Brownstein’s news analysis — but not on the front page.

Brownstein says: “Clarke testified, and the commission staff confirmed, that on Jan. 25, 2001 — five days after Bush was inaugurated — he presented national security advisor Condoleezza Rice with two planning documents from the Clinton administration that called for a series of steps to pressure Al Qaeda.” Yet Clarke had previously said, in the briefing to Fox News:

Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

That is what is known as a direct contradiction. Clarke explained this by saying that he was trying to make the Bush administration look good.

In other words, he didn’t tell the truth, because he thought that the truth would be inconsistent with his role. Now he seems to see his role as a whistleblower, and he appears once again to be willing to distort the truth to fit the role he has invented for himself.