Here's Los Angeles Times blogger/former Bush flack Andrew Malcolm, desperately trying to invent some controversy:

One of the perennially fun things about following American politics is tracking the people who say they are not running for president. The fact is, somewhere around 310,767,362 Americans will not be running for president in 2012. Most of them will not bother making a formal announcement of what they are not going to do.

…

What's intriguing now is those people who announce they are not running, often without prodding. Howard Dean, the notorious Iowa imploder, did that here recently, as The Ticket reported.

Think of it this way: If one Saturday noon out of the blue your teenager announced....

....he was not going to the mall, where is the first place you'd look for him later if necessary? For some reason, recently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose Australia as the place to say she was not running again. Flashback to her statements that she was not dropping out of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary process repeated right up to her actually dropout.

First, Dean's announcement that he will not run for president in 2012 did not come “without prodding.” It came in response to multiple columns suggesting he might do so. And Andrew Malcolm knows that -- he linked to the piece I just linked to, which makes it abundantly clear. In other words: Andrew Malcolm is lying.

Second: Malcolm's snark that Clinton choose “for some reason” to announce that she won't run in 2012 and his accompanying implication that the announcement was disingenuous was, itself, disingenuous. Clinton was asked a question and she answered it. Which Andrew Malcolm should know, since it was reported in his own newspaper.