RICH LOWRY WRITES ON CLARKE’S COLLAPSE. And Greg Djerejian observes that the New York Times and Washington Post have been forced to spin pretty hard to maintain their predetermined storyline. (“The bottom line on W. 43rd St. is thus: Clinton took al–Q seriously, Bush didn’t. And, frankly, I just can’t take that spin seriously.” Hard to, when Clarke himself said Bush increased the Clinton efforts dramatically — but of course, now Clarke says he was lying to make his boss look good back then, but that now he’s telling the disinterested truth!)

UPDATE: Reader Ted Gideon thinks I’m too hard on Clarke:

[H]asn’t it occurred yet to you or your linkees that the so-called contradictory statements largely were made as an employee/appointee of the administration, and that part of his JOB was to say what the administration wanted said? When you were in private practice did you make it a habit to file briefs or argue in court that even though your client was liable/guilty, that was no reason not to dismiss? Of course not, nor would any thinking person expect an administration official to say words to the effect of, “We couldn’t be bothered to attach any urgency to this issue because we were too busy working on tax cuts or whatever.” If an official of an administration wishes to say the emperor has no clothes, the official should resign first.

Well, leaving aside the question of whether legal ethics are an appropriate analogy here (though in fact I never presented evidence that I thought was false), Clarke wasn’t just spinning: he made specific assertions of fact back in 2002 which (1) are inconsistent with what he’s saying now; and (2) that as far as I know no one has said are false. And although I mentioned them below, let’s revisit them here:

JIM ANGLE: You’re saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that’s correct.

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you’re saying is that there was no — one, there was no [Clinton] plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of ’98 were made in the spring months just after the [Bush] administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That’s right.

Now Clarke’s saying that they were too busy with tax cuts, or whatever. But — leaving aside the problems with the “of course I was lying then, but you can trust me now!” flavor of his explanations for the discrepancy, I don’t see any evidence that those earlier statements were actually untrue. Which makes his current statements even more troubling.

It’s certainly true that if Clarke thought the Bush Administration was endangering the nation in 2002, he should have resigned. But he didn’t, did he?

Powerline has more — just keep scrolling.

Finally, Daniel Drezner offers a clue as to what’s really going on: “it’s hard not to believe that Clarke’s evaluation of presidential performance is directly correlated with how well those presidents treated Clarke.”

MORE: Some interesting thoughts on Clinton and Bush antiterror strategy.

STILL MORE: An important followup comment from Rich Lowry:

Let me be clear about this: it would have been theoretically possible for Clarke to give reporters that August 2002 briefing, emphasizing the positive aspects of the administration’s anti-terror record, and then go and write a critical book, giving what he considers a more complete view. In fact, I think Clarke could have written a very interesting and honest book criticizing the failures in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. But that is not what he has done. There is no way to square what he said in August 2002 with the actual book he has written, because it is such a totalist critique of the Bush administration that leaves out or skates over important facts he recounted in 2002. The Clarke who said in 2002 that nothing important had moved in U.S. counterterrorism policy since the end of 1998 simply cannot be squared with the Clarke of Against All Enemies.

Indeed. A good critique would be a service. This isn’t.