Ken Starr, Begone nytimes.com
We can only wish. I find Starr getting his walking papers a bit improbable at the moment, though I would dearly love to see former Starr law partner Porter testify somewhere. I'm sure he'd recall very little, Starr too. When you're involved in a sacred quest for "truth and justice" via taking out Clinton by any means available, you sometimes forget the details. Acerbic Maureen Dowd has not had many kind words for Clinton, except in comparison to the alternative. Here, she lets loose with both barrels. From yesterday's paper, I didn't get around to it till now.
You go, girlfriend.
Don't get bogged down in your usual dilly-dallying, shilly-shallying thing.
Dump the guy, Janet. He's a loser.
Worse, he's a stalker.
Maybe he didn't do rope lines, but Kenneth Starr is more creepily obsessed with tracking and trapping Bill Clinton than Monica ever was.
Janet Reno has been stewing about all the Independent Persecutor's transgressions: how his team manhandled Monica at the mall, how his office leaked and leaked, how Mr. Starr steamrolled the Attorney General into expanding his authority into the Lewinsky affair without revealing his office's contacts with Paula Jones's lawyers.
Even though the President thinks the prosecutor is evil, he is loath to play Nixon to Starr's Cox.
But when it came out that Mr. Starr was calculating how he could indict Mr. Clinton on criminal charges while he is still in office, or the day he leaves for Hollywood, the Clinton crowd realized that a wooden stake might be required.
Beyond Mr. Starr's shy smile lurks the heart of the undead.
He comes back and back and back for more blood -- from Web Hubbell, from Susan McDougal, from Julie Hiatt Steele, from Bill Clinton. Maybe poor Sidney Blumenthal is next. (Only Mr. Starr could inspire "poor" before "Sidney Blumenthal.")
In the absence of Buffy, Janet is all we've got. She has been fantasizing about slaying the prosecutor.
Certainly there are oodles of reasons to can him. He wasted a Federal fortune investigating all the serious issues -- Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate -- that could have entailed the kind of public misconduct that Americans care about. He found nothing, and instead came up with a sizzling impeachment potboiler.
The New York Times reports today that Justice Department officials are starting to build a case against the man who built the case against their boss. David Johnston and Don Van Natta reveal that Mr. Starr's deputies assured Ms. Reno's department that they had not had any contact with the Paula Jones lawyers when they sought to expand their investigation into the President's affair with the intern. Based on contemporaneous notes of that crucial meeting in January 1998, it appears that the Office of Independent Counsel misled the Justice Department, since Linda Tripp's fateful call to Mr. Starr's office was preceded by a conversation between one of Mr. Starr's deputies and a lawyer who had worked on the Jones case since 1994.
It may seem that Janet Reno is out to help the President, but really she may be rescuing the Republicans.
The Republicans may not care about Mr. Starr's ethics. But they should care about his incompetence.
The G.O.P. is supposed to be the party of big business. If Mr. Starr were a C.E.O., the stockholders would be clamoring for his head. He tried a hostile takeover and lost. And the company's stock has been plummeting.
Despite public disdain for impeachment, Mr. Starr still managed to sell the House managers a weak case. The fact that the managers' case is entirely built on Mr. Starr's tainted enterprise is why it's impossible for reasonable people to accept their arguments, even though most reasonable people believe the President lied and schemed to hide evidence.
After the House Republicans bullied the impeachment into the Senate, they were again led astray by Mr. Starr, who went to court to help them drag Monica back from California. Any idiot should have known that on the stand, Monica would try to protect the President, not bury him. She may have "mixed emotions" about her former boyfriend, but she hates Ken Starr with a passion.
When things got rough for the Republicans, the independent counsel, with his tin ear for public relations, made them worse: Word got out of his musings about indicting the President while still in office.
People used to trust the Republicans to be practical. As Calvin Coolidge put it, "The chief business of the American people is business."
But Ken Starr, with destructive cheerleading from the Christian right, helped turn Republicans into a party of scolds brandishing scarlet letters. Their new motto is more ominous: "Your business is our business."
So fire him, Janet, fire him. His business is our business. |
