ANN ALTHOUSE has thoughts on the gender dynamics of The Apprentice: “generally, women watching the show shouldn’t really be using it as a source of tips on how to look and act in the business world.”

TIM BLAIR has a new poll up. I voted for the “Sky Turtle,” but “Nobel Peace Prize” seems to be in the lead.

RICHARD CLARKE IS SUGGESTING an Al Qaeda connection to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Plenty of people have suggested that, and also suggested an Iraqi connection. But given the way such suspicions have been generally pooh-poohed, it’s interesting to see it coming from this source, and the domestic political implications are dramatic.

UPDATE: Roger Simon has further observations that are, as always, worth reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Adesnik:

Is there any hope of getting past partisan antagonism and coming up with a fair evaluation of what Richard Clarke has to say about the Bush administration? No, not really. At least for now. I think a big part of the problem is that the newspapers have been portraying Clarke as an immaculate hero and the President as a black-hatted villain.

Indeed. Adesnik has quite a survey of responses to Clarke’s testimony. Referring to an earlier post of his defending Clarke, Adesnik observes: ” I missed the real story: that Clarke was rewriting the history of what happened before September 11th.”

A lot of other people missed it — or ignored it — too.

MORE: Here’s some interesting linkage of Iraq and Al Qaeda, from Richard Clarke.

STILL MORE: Here’s a 9/11 Commission hearings flowchart that illustrates Adesnik’s point.

THIS CARTOON sums up the media worldview quite nicely.

HALLEY SUITT needs a vacation.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH is fact-checking Paul Krugman.

REMEMBER THE PLANELOAD OF SAUDIS that left shortly after 9/11? Who decided to let it go? Richard Clarke!

Full article, from the Boston Herald, here. “It’s too bad Clarke cuts no one in the Bush administration the same slack he so easily cuts himself.”

JAMES LILEKS notes that press coverage of Richard Clarke seems to be soft-pedaling his self-contradictions and dissembling:

When I said yesterday that Clarke should have expected some push-back, I should have been more clear. I meant that he must have known his contradictory statements would be made public, quickly, and these remarks, combined with his exquisitely timed book and PR push, would have an impact on his credibility. But he’s obviously smarter than I will ever be; he expected that the climate was right for his contradictions to be explained away or ignored.

Yep, it’s an election year, with a Republican incumbent. Read the whole thing, as Lileks offers rather a lot of specifics. He more or less fisks the entire Big Media coverage in one sitting.

Meanwhile Charles Krauthammer writes that Clarke is a “partisan perjurer:”

It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 — after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.

First, if the Clarke of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week — the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under oath that “fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration — certainly [there was] no higher priority” — is a liar.

Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a “mistake” Clinton’s staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia(!) above fighting al Qaeda.

Clarke gives Clinton a pass and instead concentrates his ire on Bush. For what? For not having preemptively attacked Afghanistan? On what grounds — increased terrorist chatter in June and July 2001?

Read the whole thing. But the press — many of whose leaders quietly gathered to give Kerry a hand back in the fall — is doing its best to soften up Bush for November now. If Clarke were attacking a Democratic president, they’d have been all over his contradictions. But this spin will only make his unravelling more damaging, and contribute to the ongoing self-marginalization of the old media.

UPDATE: Belgravia Dispatch says thta TNR’s Clarke coverage is dropping the ball.

MICKEY KAUS on why the Kerry camp’s self-important Vietnam analogies don’t work:

The difference, of course, is that the war Johnson fought using the Gulf of Tonkin incident produced very little except massive carnage and a Communist government in South Vietnam. The Beirut attack was a total loss. But American soldiers in Iraq–whether or not there were WMDs–are in the process of freeing a nation from a dictator. This accomplishment survives the Kay report. It doesn’t “cheapen the sacrifice” American soldiers made achieving this goal to admit the truth about the WMDs. Does Kerry think the troops haven’t achieved this?

Kaus also has some advice for Bush that the Bush people ought to read.

HERE’S A NEW POST ON AUTHOR JOHN GRAY’S rather lame legal threat aimed at a blogger. (More on the threat, and on John Gray’s rather unimpressive credentials at this link. Did Gray insist on this against his lawyer’s advice? Or did his lawyer fail to advise him against this rather self-defeating conduct?)

I had never given Gray, or his credentials, much thought before. But this threat, and the information it has brought forth, has convinced me that he’s a poser and a bully.

NICK SCHULZ has thoughts on the French, who are not our allies.

C.D. HARRIS ON RICHARD CLARKE AND HIS DEFENDERS:

Let no man say that Josh Marshall is not a master craftsman of the art of spin.

Not even Marshall’s considerable talents, however, can save Clarke and his book from the fact that the transcript completely and utterly contradicts what he’s saying now. As such, it is anything but an ‘attack on Clarke’s character.’ It is proof – dispositive proof, from the man’s own mouth – that his recent accusations are patently false. “The best they can do”? Indeed.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Roll Call notes that more people are questioning Clarke’s truthfulness. Here’s an excerpt that’s not on the free page:

House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that former White House anti-terror czar Richard Clarke, the author of a new book critical of President Bush’s handling of the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, may have lied in testimony to his committee, and said he plans to explore whether Congressional action on the matter is warranted.

Clarke’s “testimony to our committee is 180 degrees out of line with what he is saying in his book,” Goss said. “He’s either lying in his book or he lied to our committee. It’s one or the other.”

Yes, a number of us have been pointing this out.

“THE TOTAL COLLAPSE OF RICHARD CLARKE:” Does Karl Rove pay these guys, or is Bush just preternaturally lucky where his critics are concerned?

UPDATE: More here:

Defenders of Clarke (and even some of his opponents) say that he is extremely knowledgeable about the war on terror. That may be true; I don’t have the specialized knowledge of the subject to judge. But, it is more than a little troubling that even his defenders don’t tell us about his victories in that war, though it is easy to find examples of his blunders. If he is a great anti-terrorist warrior, one would think he would have some wins on his record, as well as all these losses.

Indeed.

TIME: “Richard Clarke, at War With Himself.”

I was hoping he’d be at war with the terrorists.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY has interesting thoughts on markets and politics.

WINDS OF CHANGE has its war news roundup posted. And there are lots of other interesting posts — just keep scrolling.

CABLENEWSER wonders about media silence and the 2002 Clarke interview.

UPDATE: Answer here.

TOM MAGUIRE NOTES that the Kerry assassination story is working its way up the media food chain, with the Boston Globe getting involved (though it’s still nibbling around the edges). There’s more Kerrry hedging, too, on the question of whether American troops “murdered” 200,000 Vietnamese. (He said yes back then; now he regards the word “murdered” as “inappropriate.”)

UPDATE: Okay, okay, here’s the link to the Globe story, and here’s the lede:

WASHINGTON — In a question-and-answer session before a Senate committee in 1971, John F. Kerry, who was a leading antiwar activist at the time, asserted that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being “murdered by the United States of America” and said he had gone to Paris and “talked with both delegations at the peace talks” and met with communist representatives.

Maguire has more, and additional links.

JEFF JARVIS, a survivor of the WTC attacks, is unsatisfied with Richard Clarke’s “apology” — and he’s not the only one.