Throughout a Long, Tendentious Day, No Few Americans Stifle a Yawn nytimes.com
Borzou, I missed your confession of membership in the fifth estate (what were the first 4 anyway?), although your profile is clear. Anyway, here's a brief roundup from the NYT today, quoted without comment. None of these stories are straight news or analysis, others can look those up if they want. Just a man on the street piece, a media analysis, and a couple op-ed pieces from interesting sources. At this point, it's all entertainment to me, though I don't have the patience to sit through TV coverage. From the above story:
Glenn Cartwright stood before the cash register with his lips pursed, unable to decide between a Lightnin' Hopkins and a Clifton Chenier CD, but he was certain of one thing: When he got home, he was not going to turn the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearing back on.
"I watched it for a while this morning, but it was all the same stuff we'd heard before," said Cartwright, a 27-year-old Houston graduate student. "It was like a remake of a movie you didn't like in the first place. I'd rather watch an infomercial about a new mop."
Perhaps it was because the hearing took place on a weekday, when the children were in school and most of the country was going about its hectic business. Perhaps it was because it was intruding into the realm of afternoon talk shows and soap operas. But there were further signs Thursday that the long-running Monica Lewinsky television series was continuing to lose its grip on the American imagination.
"I'm just bored with the whole thing," said Deborah Shely, a 35-year-old legal secretary in Miami. "I just think it should be over."
A Self-Proclaimed Joe Friday Just Plays It Straight nytimes.com
Only at the end of the day, when Starr was questioned by David Kendall, the president's personal lawyer, did the questions become pointed enough to challenge Starr's unflappable demeanor and stock responses.
The prediction that Kendall and Starr would be well-matched legal adversaries was the one prediction that turned out to be true. As Kendall grilled Starr about matters such as leaks to the media from his office and his legal firm's links to the Paula Jones case, Starr often responded like a defendent rather than an unflappable witness.
Their exchange proved that there is still drama left in the impeachment inquiry, though it is usually obscured by political posturing. The day before, in a statement about the committee process that quickly became a favorite sound-bite, Rep. Maxine Waters said, "If it goes on the way it's going now, it will be great theater, but it will have nothing to do with a fair process of trying to get the truth."
It was not great theater, and the choice is not either/or, theater or fairness. The theatrical component has become inescapable, however much Starr pretends to ignore that. What Thursday's largely uneventful day proved is that Joe Friday's days as a television hero have passed.
Prosecutor and Judge nytimes.com
A prosecution is the ultimate contest between the state and the individual. Accordingly, an individual -- even the President of the United States -- is entitled to defend himself by any lawful means, including publicly attacking the prosecutor or asserting privilege claims of arguable validity.
Lacking on-the-job experience, Mr. Starr, as he acknowledged several times before the committee, came to depend on the cadre of career prosecutors surrounding him (a group once described to me by a former Justice Department lawyer who had worked with them as "not the A team.") The take-no-prisoners attitude of these prosecutors was clearly manifest in the sneering tones in which they questioned the President during his videotaped grand jury appearance.
They seem to have persuaded Mr. Starr to adopt a variety of ham-handed tactics correctly perceived as verging on prosecutorial abuse: forcing Monica Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, to testify against her daughter, and threatening to prosecute Ms. Lewis to secure her daughter's cooperation. The decision to indict Webster Hubbell for the third time, just days before yesterday's committee hearing, smacks of vindictiveness, since a Federal judge had earlier dismissed Mr. Starr's second indictment as prosecutorial overreaching.
In his testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Starr defended his harsh tactics by claiming that they were standard prosecutorial procedure; he responded to criticism by Representative John Conyers by saying that "it was not our place to reinvent the investigative wheel." But saying "it has happened before" is a poor excuse for unfairness, especially from someone with the responsibilities of the independent counsel.
Before the committee, he was not content to allow his evidence to speak for itself. Nor did he simply answer questions. Instead, he engaged in a lengthy exercise in self-defense and a detailed j'accuse, in which he arrogated to himself the right not simply to state the evidence, but to weigh the proof and render judgment, functions that prosecutors are supposed to surrender to the finder of fact.
As the day wore on, with Democrats trying to lance Mr. Starr for his alleged ethical lapses and Republicans rising to bandage his wounds and excoriate the President, Mr. Starr's role as a political point man was painfully obvious.
No matter what the Republicans on the committee or Mr. Starr hoped to accomplish by his testimony, I suspect it will be remembered as a sad and oddly fitting end to his investigation. He indelibly aligned himself in the public mind with the President's opponents, and by so doing fully embraced the appearance of partiality he was appointed to avoid.
The Centipede Expert nytimes.com
ME: But if Mr. Starr was trying to do what prosecutors always do, why has he had so much trouble?
NIXON: Will you please wake up, Len? This isn't a prosecution; it's politics. The whole country is the jury, and they're hopelessly hung and just want to go home. Not because they're tired of wallowing in scandal but because most of them think they would have done what the President did: lie, cover up, fly to the moon, anything to save the marriage.
ME: You mean Mr. Starr was naïve if he thought his testimony would change anything?
NIXON: No, no, no. (He smiles that surprisingly sunny smile.) You remember what John Connally said was the basic truth about politics? He'd say, "You just never know." Remember those long, quiet stretches during Watergate, Len, when we were sure the worst was over and that we were going to survive?
ME: I suppose so.
NIXON: Then another shoe would fall -- taxes, tapes -- and we'd sink a little lower. The scandal centipede has 101 feet. The case is never closed. (Looks at his watch.) Time to run, Len.
Lots of rules now. Remember law and order? There's lots of it at my present location. And these guys don't allow legal hair-splitting. |
