Dr. McNamee: The Best Moments from Roger Clemens' Steroids Hearing

You would think that on the day that some Major League Baseball teams saw their pitchers and catchers arrive in Florida, the first bellwether of the coming baseball season, that nothing baseball related could make me more excited than the prospect of pitchers popping gloves and catchers loafing around training facilities. But if you thought that, you clearly were living under a rock for most of the day. Or maybe you were out of the country. Well, if so, welcome back.

Without a shadow of a doubt, February 13th, 2008 will go down in my personal history as one of the greatest days in baseball history.

Roger Clemens versus Brian McNamee is our generation's Ali-Frazier.

And yeah, for all you people out there complaining about Congress and how they should have better things to do than worry about the steroid use of one over-inflated, hubris-ridden, blindly arrogant son-of-a-bitch like Roger Clemens, you're right. They probably should. But I defy them to produce a hearing more entertaining. Seriously. Do you think some oversight committee about military spending would have so many laugh-lines, so many absurdly surreal moments and so many villains? This was like watching a Coen Brothers movie for six hours straight.

Or maybe a better cultural reference would be calling it the Mos Eisley of Washington, DC. Because without question, rarely have I seen such a wretched hive of scum and villainy than what I saw play out today on ESPN, CNN and MSNBC. The only people who managed to walk out of the hearings without gallons of slime all over them were Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD), who for the record, should not be confused with wife-beater and statutory rapist Elijah Dukes.

Other than them however, the congressmen and congresswomen of this great country showed themselves to be obtuse, confused and completely uneducated. It's no wonder they collectively have an approval rating as low as GW.

And then of course there was the Rocketman. Only a douchebag like Roger Clemens could make a complete piece of garbage like Brian McNamee look like a good guy. It really takes quite a man to pull off a stunt like that. Think about it: McNamee is a PROVEN LIAR, the type of man who horded old syringes and gauze pads with the hope of using them against Clemens at a later date (Monica Lewinsky, hello!) and is basically, as Chris Shays (R-CT) called him, a "drug dealer." And yet by the end of these hearings, an overwhelming majority of people thought that HE was the one telling the truth in all this. An ESPN.com poll of almost 53,000 people found that 77% of those participating thought that McNamee was the truthful party in this debate.

Here, quickly, are my favorite moments from the day:

1.) At 10:53AM, Clemens in responding to Elijah Cummings questions about how Andy Pettitte told the committee that Clemens told him that he used HGH (confused yet?), uttered the following immortal sentence: "My problem with what Andy says, and why I think he misremembers..."

Misremembers? Whosahwhat? Whatsawho?

Hi, if you believe a guy who uses the word "misremembers," then you are an idiot.

2.) At 11:24AM, Clemens throws his wife under the bus, saying that she was injected with HGH by McNamee, but not him.

Real stand up guy here. And before Valentine's Day no less. Picture that conversation this morning. "Hey honey, yeah, I'm going to say you did HGH, but I didn't. Is that cool? Want to make me some eggs?"

3.) At 11:39AM, Dan Burton (R-IN), taunts Brian McNamee by calling him a liar repeatedly. He then closes out his psychotic ranting by stating: "Roger Clemens is a baseball titan. He's a titan in baseball. And you, with all these lies, if they're not true, are destroying him and his reputation. Now how does he get his reputation back, if this is not true. And how can we believe you, because you've lied and lied and lied and lied. And the thing I want to say is that we have this penchant in the country of trial by media. I understand the media has the right to come to these things and get all the information that they can. But until a man is proven guilty, he's innocent. And this kind of a hearing and this kind of a circus, as I call it, really bothers me. If he's done something wrong, he ought to be indicted, he ought to be prosecuted and he ought to be punished for it. But I haven't seen any evidence of that so far. And with that, I'll stop."

Pretty strong words, right?

What's that you say? Dan Burton is a full-on INSANE person? A jerk-off of the highest order?

Wow, I'm shocked.

For starters, Burton was right out in front of the Bill Clinton impeachment charges, which apparently doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of "innocent until proven guilty." And the Clinton impeachment also doesn't fall under "media circus" either.

I could go on and on, but rather, I'll just direct you to this Time Magazine article from May of 1998. An excerpt:

Dan Burton thinks the White House bugs his phone. Dan Burton is so convinced Vince Foster was murdered that he brought a pistol into the backyard of his Indiana home and reenacted the crime -- reportedly with a pumpkin standing in for Foster's head. Dan Burton is so afraid of catching AIDS that he brings his own scissors to the House barbershop and refuses to eat soup at public restaurants. But the man who will do or say anything to nail Bill Clinton suddenly has the worst problem a paranoiac can have: He keeps making more enemies.

And if you'd like to read more, there's always this Salon piece that talks about how Burton fathered a child out of wedlock. And he's calling McNamee a liar and a scumbag?

Oh wait, sorry. He called Bill Clinton a "scumbag." He only called McNamee a "liar."

My mistake.

4.) At 12:44PM, Henry Waxman (D-CA) tells Roger Clemens' lawyer and resident ambulance chaser, Rusty Hardin that he "is not going to be recognized," as he double talks about how Clemens handled meeting with his former nanny over the weekend.

Henry Waxman, I think you just became my personal hero. That's got the be the coolest thing about being in charge of a congressional committee. If you want, you get to tell people that they basically do not exist. Amazing.

5.) At 2:10PM, Virginia Foxx (R-NC) held up four pictures of Roger Clemens, clearly showing how his body had changed from when he was a kid in Boston to when he was a mercenary in Houston and New York. Shockingly, Foxx then stated that it's clear by looking at the pictures that Clemens looks the same in all four. At the end of the hearing, she reportedly got up and shook Clemens hand and hugged his wife.

Hilarious sequence! This old bat holds four pictures up, four pictures that clearly show Clemens' body has changed pretty dramatically over the course of the last 20 years (in layman's terms, that means Clemens USED STEROIDS!!!!!!), and then has the gall and nerve to say that they show no body difference? Maybe she needs her eyes checked. She reminded me of the old lady in My Cousin Vinny: "So how many layers of thickness would you say you've gone through?"

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Anyway, yeah, this was a banner day for me. I got to see one of the people on my "I Hate You and Wish Bad Things Upon You" list get thrown to the wolves and eaten alive. I got to see Republican Congressman from all over the country look like completely ignorant a-holes. And I got to see it all live on television.

Only in America.