I'd guess Starr was actually cheering Newt on. It was a grudge match, Starr was out for blood. Back to Sullivan, this is the first 2 paragraphs in that NYT magazine article
I can't remember now at which point during the Starr report I stopped reading. Maybe it was the sudden prim reminder that the President's wife" was out of the country during one of President Clinton's hallway trysts. Or the superfluously wounding inference that the President was considering leaving his wife after his second term. Or the inclusion of the date for one of the President's liaisons: Easter Sunday. Or any one of the points when it simply became obvious that the narrative, compelling and lucid as it was, seemed to be building a case not so much for the President's public, legal impropriety but for a private, moral iniquity. And I stopped reading not because I sympathize with President Clinton's repeated public lies, or his abuse of power and of his office. (I still think he should resign.) Nor because I am instinctively a liberal. I stopped reading at some point because it became depressingly clear that the Starr report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in what has gone wrong with an American Presidency, but also a case study in what has gone wrong with American conservatism.
To be sure, Bill Clinton goaded the independent counsel into some of this detail by the hairsplitting of his legal defense. But not all of it. And to be sure, Bill Clinton, by his failure to settle, and then to apologize, and then to tell the truth, was responsible in the first place for the nine months of trauma. But again, not entirely. For Bill Clinton was responsible for none of the prurient, lip-pursing moralism of the report, nor for the subsequent, egregious outspilling of grand-jury testimony. Proof of perjury or obstruction of justice required none of this, as most Americans immediately understood. This moral obsessiveness was the creation of Kenneth Starr and something far larger than Kenneth Starr. It was the creation of a conservatism become puritanism, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles of privacy and restraint, modesty and constitutionalism, which used to be its hallmarks. |
