That members of Congress spent nearly five hours Wednesday impersonating dogs sniffing out steroids at some airport baggage claim rather than fixing the economy or the war in Iraq is bad enough.

That either Roger Clemens or former trainer Brian McNamee sat in the room and lied repeatedly, under oath, wasting time that should have been better spent, is utterly reprehensible.

Add up the numbers on the scorecard any way you want at the end of the big day, and there's still no final score. No winner. No way on Earth to finger beyond a reasonable doubt which of these men is lying.

Roger Clemens' attorneys get a little heated at one point. (AP)

And Clemens did not have a good enough day Wednesday to win that battle, or even come close to winning. Polls so far show that roughly two-thirds of people following this sewage spill of a story find McNamee more believable than Clemens, and nothing that happened on Capitol Hill during the hearing changed that. You still have to go a lot further to suspend your disbelief with Clemens than you do with McNamee.

HGH is such a foreign topic in the Clemens family home that Roger had no idea that his wife, Debbie, was injected until after the fact? That kind of stuff goes on, especially in the home of an elite athlete, while that athlete remains blind? Really? Hmm, maybe that's why my wife can suddenly bench 300 pounds, and how she was able to pick up and move the refrigerator all by her lonesome before I got home the other night.

I'd better get hooked into this new world.

Clemens was earnest, passionate and lawyered up, but one colossal missing link remains: If he has been steroid- and HGH-free for his entire career, what is McNamee's motive for tossing him to the lions?

Had McNamee been treated badly by Clemens, that would be suffice. Had Clemens fired him and then trash-talked him to other players so that they wouldn't hire McNamee, bingo. Now Clemens would have what is known in the trade as "plausible deniability," a perfectly good reason to show why maybe some sleazeball is trying to ruin him.

But, nothing on that front. Instead, Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch, Clemens' former Yankees teammates, corroborated McNamee's accusations against them in sworn depositions. And Pettitte, one of Clemens' best buds, rolled him in an affidavit to members of Congress. Pettitte's wife, Laura, too.

So far, Pettitte's is the most damning evidence against Clemens yet.

Look, there are obvious issues with McNamee's credibility, but we're still waiting to hear a good reason why he would be telling the truth about injecting Pettitte and Knoblauch and yet lying about Clemens.

What was most remarkable about Wednesday's hearing was simply the lack of 11th-hour developments. Neither Clemens nor McNamee backed away from their stories, up to and even after taking an oath. Neither invoked the Fifth Amendment, nor suddenly took the English-as-a-second-language defense.

Surprises? Yes. Nobody figured that part of the hearing would devolve into what Clemens' nanny knew about Jose Canseco's barbecue and when she knew it.

And I suppose, it was a breath of fresh air that, so far, McNamee hasn't claimed to have injected the Clemens family pooch with HGH. Stay tuned.

With perjury and criminal charges potentially hanging in the balance, both men dug in even deeper.

"Let me be clear: I have never, taken steroids, human growth hormones or any other performance-enhancing drug," Clemens told the committee.

"I now believe the number of times I injected Roger Clemens and Chuck Knoblauch is actually greater than I originally stated," McNamee told the committee.

The most intelligent thing anybody has said on this topic in weeks, by the way, came from former pitcher David Cone when he signed on as a member of the Yankees broadcast team last week. Cone was on the players union's negotiating team during the 1994-95 strike, a time when management proposed drug testing and the union successfully blocked it.

"Certainly in retrospect, I think there's plenty of blame to go around," Cone said. "Certainly, I share some of that blame as being involved with the players association at that time. It's something I'm not proud of.

"It's humbling. It's embarrassing."

He's right. The union failed the players by not getting in front of this issue back then, which would have protected both their health and their reputations, and it led to where we are today.

Clemens has repeatedly said that the reason he declined to meet with Sen. George Mitchell and his staff of investigators is because he wasn't aware that these charges would be included in the report. Charlie Scheeler, the Mitchell Report investigator who was summoned to the hearing along with Clemens and McNamee, testified that Mitchell's staff repeatedly attempted to contact Clemens and others.

The union's attempt to stonewall investigators throughout the past two years, and the players' continued code of silence, is nearly as reprehensible as the lies that Clemens or McNamee was feeding to Congress.

Say Clemens really is innocent. Then the union has blood on its hands, playing a significant role in ruining the reputation of a good man and a baseball icon by creating a culture of drugs and then failing to properly handle the Mitchell Report and protect the innocent.

Say he's guilty, which puts you right there with, ahem, Pettitte. Then the union isn't fully to blame, because the world is filled with lawbreakers, but Don Fehr and his boys still have hard questions to answer as to how so much of this could have been avoided had they not been so unreasonable and pig-headed during the time Cone feels so terribly guilty about.

One of the strangest things about Wednesday -- and another mark that does little to promote his innocence -- was that little of Clemens' outrage is directed at his agents or the union. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) asked him directly why he hadn't fired his agents or wasn't livid with the union if nobody bothered mentioning to him that, hey, there's this thing called the Mitchell Report coming out and they want to talk to you and it might be a good idea to at least talk to them and see what's in it.

Instead, he talked about what a trusting person he is when quizzed on why he employed McNamee for so long even after he discovered that the trainer hold told some, uh, fibs.

Portraying himself as having the patience of Job, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) finally replied, "Mr. Clemens, all I can say is I'm sure you're going to heaven."

Meantime, exhibiting the very questionable ethics of some of the committee members who met with Clemens privately and posed for pictures -- godding up to the players, as the late sports columnist Red Smith used to say with disdain -- Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) told Clemens during the hearing that a colleague of his wanted to know what "uniform" he would be wearing into the Hall of Fame.

In the midst of the muck, the only two things clear from Wednesday were that the Hall of Fame appears so much further from Clemens' grasp today than it has been for years, and that Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) offered the most lucid comment of the day.

"When people say there should not be independent (drug) testing in baseball," Souder said, "I don't see, given this track record, that there can be anything but independent testing."