To: Ish who wrote (28032 ) 1/14/1999 8:07:00 PM From: Daniel Schuh Respond to
You get into this layering issue here, Ish. Who started the moralizing? Here's one take, posted previously in Message 7268609 : 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.
