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Fingering the finger-waggers

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published August 7, 2005

Rafael Palmeiro wagged his finger at us just like Bill Clinton did when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman. . ."

Palmeiro's words were as unequivocal as Clinton's too. "Let me start by telling you this," the Baltimore Orioles star told members of a congressional committee investigating steroid use in baseball. "I have never used steroids. Period. I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never."

As a result of his seemingly candid testimony last March, Palmeiro was the only baseball player or executive involved in the hearings who came away with his reputation intact. Mark McGwire was a blubbering, unresponsive, shrunken wretch. Sammy Sosa suddenly lost the ability to communicate in English. Commissioner Bud Selig and representatives of the players' union behaved like clueless truants. Jose Canseco, whose self-serving book alleging rampant steroid abuse in baseball helped to provoke the hearings, was treated like an outcast.

Only Palmeiro walked away from the hearings with his head held high. Until then, he was best known as the first celebrity pitchman for Viagra. But in a neat image switch, his performance at the hearings turned him into the culture's most powerful voice against performance-enhancing drugs. And when he got his 3,000th career hit in July, reaching a milestone that traditionally leads to the Hall of Fame, he seemed ready to end his career in glory.

But now Palmeiro is sitting out a 10-day suspension for violating baseball's steroid policy. And that "period" in his stirring congressional testimony has turned into an adverb. "I have never intentionally used steroids," Palmeiro said after the suspension was announced. From the start, that watered-down claim sounded as lame as control-freak Barry Bonds' protestations that he had no idea that the "cream" and "clear" he regularly used might include some illegal ingredient. "When (Bonds' trainer Greg Anderson) said it was flaxseed oil, I just said, "Whatever,' " Bonds told a grand jury, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. "I had no doubt what he was giving me, because we were friends."

Palmeiro's new spin became even less credible after it was reported that he had specifically tested positive for stanozolol, a powerful steroid that can't be accidentally ingested through some nutritional supplement.

Such linguistic backtracks are all too common in public life. Bill Clinton lapsed from his absolute denial of sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky into Jesuitical expositions of "what the meaning of "is' is" and whether oral sex counts as sex.

In the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal, George W. Bush ran for president as the anti-Clinton, promising in 2000 to "uphold the honor and dignity of the office," not just the narrow letter of the law. But President Bush, not for the first time, sounded positively Clintonian the other day. Months ago, he vowed to fire any member of his staff who was involved in leaking the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, had undercut the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger. But once top Bush adviser Karl Rove was implicated in the leak, the president lowered his standard. Now he promises only to fire anyone who "committed a crime." Dishonorable and undignified apparently are tolerable now.

And speaking of what the definition of "is" is, the Bush administration also tried to concoct an inventive way to help the president weasel out of his promise to maintain a moratorium on oil and gas drilling off Florida's Gulf Coast: They've simply changed the definition of what Florida is.

During last month's devious dealings over a new energy bill, the White House and congressional leaders cooked up legislation that simply took away a slice of the gulf that had belonged to Florida and gave it to Louisiana. The scheme was rejected by Congress at the last minute.

"I was surprised the administration took this position so aggressively," U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., normally a dependable White House supporter, told the Times. "I know the president has been aggressive about (preventing) drilling off Florida. The question is how you really define Florida."

[Last modified August 5, 2005, 19:33:02]