K.T. McFARLAND WAS ONLY JOKING? WE SEEM TO HEAR THAT A LOT ABOUT HER

Earlier this week, Bob Woodward reported that in 2011 Roger Ailes urged David Petraeus to run for president; the suggestion was relayed via Kathleen "K.T." McFarland, a Fox News national security correspondent. Now McFarland has taken to her Fox blog to say she was only joking:

My comment was prompted by a conversation I had had with Roger before leaving for Afghanistan. We discussed many topics, most involving national security. On my way out, I casually told him, I'll give the general your regards, shall I? Roger smiled and replied something to the effect of, tell him if they don't make him chairman of the joint chiefs, he ought to jump into the presidential race to stir things up. I know now that Roger was joking, but at the time, I wasn't sure....

Petraeus and I were having fun. Having just told me definitively that he wouldn't run, he suggested that maybe Ailes could run this non-existent campaign. It was not a serious conversation plotting General Petraeus' political future; it was the kind of idle speculation that happens in every campaign season. That's why they call it the silly season. I knew he was serious about not wanting to run, and he knew I wasn't serious in pressing it.

Curiously, this isn't the first time McFarland has made the news for saying something we were later told was a joke. Back in 2006, she was pursuing the GOP Senate nomination in New York State, wanting to run against Hillary Clinton. Then the New York Post reported this:

A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

"Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event....

McFarland spokesman William O'Reilly responded that the GOP hopeful was just kidding around with her far-fetched claims.

"It was a joke, and people laughed," O'Reilly insisted.

But three witnesses who were present said nobody in the audience cracked a smile.

"The whole room sort of went silent when she said it," one person said....

McFarland has a rather checkered past -- she's engaged in resume padding, she became estranged from her gay brother as he was dying of AIDS in the 1990s (and wouldn't let her children visit him), and, well, there's quite a bit more where that came from. So, no, I don't buy her version of the Ailes story.