Time will tell, but right now it would seem that the vitamin B12 explanation isn’t working much better for Roger Clemens than the flaxseed oil defense did for Barry Bonds.

Clemens told Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes interview to be aired this evening that, contrary to allegations, he received injections of vitamin B12 and lidocaine earlier in his career, not steroids and human growth hormones.

Sports writers and sports columnists don’t seem to be taking Clemens at his word, in part because they’ve been down this road before.

During life, Heinz Prechter was a powerful force in industry and politics.

He got his start in the 1960s, by installing car sunroofs, a feature common in his home country of Germany, but relatively unheard of then in the U.S. Prechter built the operation into a global automotive company, ASC Inc.

At the same time, he assumed enormous influence in Republican politics, co-chairing the national finance committee for President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 re-election and bringing early support to George W. Bush’s first presidential run.

Yet his public image was very much at odds with his private torments. Prechter suffered from manic depression, or bipolar disorder, but had kept his illness secret.