please oh please oh please

I turned off the telly last night before seeing the wonder that was Dean's…uh, concession speech. And given a day to reflect, I must reluctantly conclude that this is the scream, not of a man being goosed by a porcupine, but rather of a sorry little ex-governor inadvertently sticking a fork into his presidential aspirations.

Bummer.

But for those of us hoping beyond hope that the Democrats will still nominate a self-deluded fool of McGovernesque proportions: well, there's always Wesley Clark—who, after all, just accepted McGovern's endorsement.

The inestimable Mark Steyn:

I'd say Howard Dean is a sane man pretending to be crazy. Whereas General Clark gives every indication of a crazy man pretending to be sane. …

[L]ike this screwy response to a question from MSNBC's Chris Matthews. The general had indicated he wished Osama bin Laden to be tried at the Hague and sentenced to life in prison. “But,” asked Matthews, “doesn't life in Holland beat life in a cave?”

“Not in a Dutch prison, Chris,” said Clark. “They're under water, they're damp, they're cold. They're really miserable.”

Underwater. Ooooh…I'm gonna tell the UNHCHR.

What do Clark's goofs reveal? For example, the bizarre claim he made after 9/11 that ''people around the White House'' had called him on the day to tell him to go on TV and connect the attack to Saddam Hussein. As the weeks went by, he modified the story, until it emerged that it wasn't ''people,'' just one fellow; and he didn't call on 9/11, but afterward, and he wasn't from the White House at all but from some think tank in Montreal, which from the look of the map isn't even in the District of Columbia. And the fellow from Montreal said true — he had called General Clark — but they hadn't talked about Saddam at all.

Clark was sold to the Democratic Party as a military man of peaceful manner: Generals are from Mars, but this one's from Venus. But there's a common theme to every glimpse of the real Clark, whether it's his own private fantasies about the White House calling him on 9/11 or memories of those who served with him, like the British general who refused an order by Clark to launch an insane attack on Russian forces in Kosovo: At best, he's a thin-skinned, vain, insecure man with a need to insert himself at the center of every story; at worst, he's a paranoid megalomaniac narcissist.

No worries; bring him on.

Pretty please?

UPDATE 012104. Oh, great. Now we have Wesley Clark cheesecake. (Or is it beefcake? Not sure what the proper term of art would be in this case.)

(Thanks—I think—to Drudge.)