As Andrew Sullivan has been noting, Josh Marshall has been rushing to make everything Wesley Clark does seem reasonable. I think that’s too bad, because Marshall’s made a name for himself as a relatively intellectually honest broker. It seems to me that Marshall’s confusion stems from the fact that just because you can make something crazy sound sane, doesn’t mean it is in fact sane. Rationalizations do not make everything rational. Marshall’s current spin challenge is that Clark’s been saying things which were clearly intended to mean something very different than the reasonable gloss Marshall keeps putting on it. The other day Marshall explained what Clark really means when he says Bush “never intended” to catch Osama. Clark’s referring to the White House’s strategic decision to shift resources to Iraq, Marshall insists. Okay. But on the stump, that’s simply not how Clark wants to be heard. Why say, for example, that if Newsweek can find Osama Bin Laden the administration could too if it wanted? Marshall surely knows that Clark is trying to out-Dean Howard Dean by holding a massive fire-sale on his own credibility.

As for this newly revealed Clark testimony which Marshall dismisses as “Drudgitprop,” Marshall again tries quite hard to make it seem like there’s no inconsistency with Clark’s past statements. Everything’s all so reasonable, Marshall insists. But that’s simply bogus. This week Clark suggested that Congress should start an investigation to see if Bush should be impeached for the “crime” of going to war. Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich get to say something like that. Wesley Clark doesn’t.

Even if Clark’s 2002 testimony means exactly what Marshall says it means (it doesn’t), there’s no way you could conclude that it was given by a man who thinks Bush should be impeached if he follows Richard Perle’s advice. Clark may, as Marshall points out, have some differences with the administration, but they were obviously minor in the scheme of things. If conservatives had said in response to Clark’s 2002 testimony, “See! Clark thinks Bush should be impeached if we go to war with Iraq!” Marshall would surely have said conservatives are fools. But now Marshall would have us believe that there’s nothing inconsistent between the old (pro-Bush) Clark and the new say-anything Clark. Indeed, if Marshall believes that Clark would have dismissed the first Gulf War as nothing more than a “war for oil” before Clark started running for office, I think he’s hitting the Cool Aid a bit too hard.

The same certainly holds for Howard Dean too. But we’ve heard all that before.