Molly Ivins hits it on the head, as usual

Molly Ivins opines a lot of what I've been thinking about this entire Richard Clark situation. Particularly, she realizes that all the contradictory statements pouring out of the White House isn't going to hurt them as much as could be hoped. It's just Rove's tactic to keep throwing shit until something sticks, and it's as likely as not to make Clark seem confused and contradictory as the White House.
The moral of all this is that the best way to get media attention is to have the best, most iconic narrative and yours will be the one accepted regardless of actual facts. People have been hauling out fact after fact to demonstrate that Bush is lying and self-serving, but it wouldn't stick without any narrative structure. Clark's story is a classic narrative, complete with a gut-wrenching scene of betrayal where our hero speaks truth to the self-serving politician and is shown the door. Naturally the President's people are going to try to introduce so much clutter that this engaging image is lost.
The next step will be that Bush's people are going to concoct another compelling and easy to understand storyline and introduce it to the media as a distraction from the 9/11 commission. My guess is that since Gary Hart will be getting more and more airtime soon due to his own warnings to the administration that were ignored, and because it's Rove's favorite political ploy, some type of sex-oriented political smearing is in the works.
I also hope that John Kerry stays the hell away from commenting on this Clark thing altogether. If he gets in the fray, they will pull out all stops. You can probably expect to see ugly smears of his wife and children in this election, but those smears will come out sooner if he joins the pile-on that's going now. He needs to take a page out of Bush's book and at least pretend to be above it all.