Seriously, Clark -- like most generals -- has a low opinion of politicians, which he has already demonstrated to the peril of his brief campaign. Generals are usually impatient with the tug and pull of politics and the dissimulations. Clark, who reportedly once voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has had a fleeting friendship with Bill Clinton.

Now he seems to think all politicians are liars. He has taken the measure of the Democratic field (which has a large number of liars) and concluded that he can compete with it easily in terms of posturing and mendacity. Within a matter of weeks, he has told at least three lies and been caught out every time. Clinton can get by with that kind of a record, but not a retired general.

There was his false claim that the White House importuned on him to link the Sept. 11 terrorists to Iraq. Then he revised his assertion, claiming that it was a Canadian "think tank" that importuned on him. The think tank could not be identified. Then he told supporters that he would have voted for entering the Iraq war. When that upset some of them, he reversed himself saying he "never" would have voted for the war.

Finally, there is the flap over Karl Rove. Clark claims after Sept. 11 Rove repeatedly failed to return calls to him from the general. Rove has no record of such calls.

What are we to make of the fantasy that is the presidential campaign of Gen. Wesley Clark? My suggestion is that the liberals have finally found their very own Gen. Douglas MacArthur. That "old soldier" who told us that such venerable figures "never die; they just fade away" aroused derision and horror from the liberals in the early 1950s.

This one wanted to put massive numbers of troops in Kosovo in the 1990s and to fire on a Russian contingent a decade after the Cold War had ended. Now he tells us we have acted imprudently in liberating Iraq and sobering up the Middle East, where terrorists not long ago thought they could attack America with impunity.

He would have us act there today as President Bill Clinton acted in the 1990s, setting the stage for more fury against America in the future. He will in time fade away, but his mighty rise in the liberals' esteem demonstrates their desperation.