A L S O+T O D A Y Starr Wars By Joan Walsh The Democrats strike back Nothing has changed Compiled by Lori Leibovich and Fiona Morgan The consensus of political experts is that no minds were changed by Starr's day in court Starr on the stand An uncut transcript of Thursday's sometimes rancorous and often bitterly partisan congressional impeachment proceedings Dear Ken The full text of ethics advisor Sam Dash's letter of resignation to Kenneth Starr Starr speaks The full text of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's House Judiciary Committee testimony A dozen questions Congress should ask Kenneth Starr By David Talbot, Murray Waas and Joan Walsh (11/18/98)   T A B L E+T A L K Discuss Ken Starr and his testimony in the Politics area of Table Talk   R E C E N T L Y Same Old Party By Joshua Micah Marshall New leadership can't mend the rifts among Republicans in Congress (11/19/98) Reply to C.D. Ellison By David Horowitz It's time for blacks to have a two-party system, too (11/19/98) Toppling Saddam By Frank Smyth Clinton wants a new government in Baghdad, but he and the Iraqi opposition are unlikely to be up to the task (11/18/98) Brother on brother By Murray Waas Whitewater witness David Hale attempted to suborn perjury by his own brother by asking him to falsely corroborate illegal acts by President Clinton (11/17/98) The mark of Cain: a tale of two brothers By Murray Waas Though they traveled the same path from the family dirt farm through law school, the Hale brothers turned out different as night and day (11/17/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.
		Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Starr When the real Kenneth Starr finally stood up before the House, he turned out to have a split personality. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY GARY KAMIYA "One may smile, and smile, and be a villain." With only slight modification, the musings Hamlet applied to his murderous uncle can also be applied to independent counsel Kenneth Starr: One may drone, and drone, and be a villain. In his appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, Starr launched a carefully choreographed blandness blitz, a wild orgy of soft-spoken probity. But it was all too apparent that beneath his milquetoast Clark Kent exterior lay a fierce partisan. No matter how convincingly Starr tried to portray himself as a model of gentle and manly judiciousness, his actions spoke louder. And those are the actions of a man entrusted with virtually unlimited power who, through prosecutorial recklessness and an all-consuming desire to "win," has allowed himself to become a tool of political zealots. The Starr who appeared on the witness stand Thursday is a fascinating study -- an obsessively legalistic man so steeped in a right-wing atmosphere where revulsion at President Clinton goes without saying, and so unconscious of that bias, that he may not even be aware that at some point he crossed a fatal line and began searching for a crime to attach to the man. Starr does not seem to be a liar -- he really believes that he is completely fair-minded, that he was simply after the facts. Hence his utterly plausible, utterly unflappable, even likable demeanor during his long ordeal. And hence his weird apparent obliviousness to the obviously partisan bias of his referral. To take just one example, as Barney Frank acidly pointed out to him, Starr's referral conveniently neglected to state that his office had exonerated Clinton on Filegate -- it wasn't until after the election that Starr saw fit to make that piece of information known. Starr sees nothing wrong with that because his bias is so deep he is unaware of it -- or because he is possessed of a quasi-religious conviction that all tactics are valid when used in battle with the Evil One who holds forth, clenching a cigar between his cloven hooves, in the Oval Office. St. Ken vs. Beelzebubba. Only an unconscious zealot -- or alternatively, a more consciously political agent who had grown soft and smug, whose warning systems had atrophied after years of right-wing domination -- could so easily and blandly ignore even a pretense of objectivity. It is easy to forget that the independent counsel is not an ordinary prosecutor -- more than a prosecutor, he is supposed to be a quasi-judge. He evaluates evidence, he does not slant it "his way" -- he is not supposed to have a "way." He is searching for the truth. From Archibald Cox to Lawrence Walsh, this is what this strange and soon-to-be-extinct creature has always done. But as Democrat after Democrat pointed out in their grilling of Starr, in every single case in his referral, Starr slanted -- or, to use his word, "interpreted" -- the evidence. Have we grown so cynically accustomed to the idea that Starr is a partisan that we've forgotten just how far he has departed from what his office is supposed to represent? The most egregious example of Starr's slanting of evidence, cited by New York Sen.-elect Charles Schumer among others, was Starr's failure to include the verbatim transcript of Monica Lewinsky's famous statement to the grand jury that no one asked her to lie. Starr's explanation for his relegation of that statement to an appendix, and his paraphrasing of it in the body of the referral as "explicitly asked," is a smart bit of legal exegesis, and may well be true: Placed against the whole body of evidence, her one statement is misleading; conspirators (if we can dignify the desperate, furtive wrigglings of doomed interrupted-fellatio practitioners with that Brutuslike title) don't say to each other, "Now, remember to lie!" But the plausibility of Starr's interpretation isn't the point. Starr may be as astute a practitioner of hermeneutics as Harold Bloom, but his job was to deliver the facts -- not to decide what they meant. Particularly not when, in every instance, what they mean turns out to be unfavorable to his adversary. N E X T+P A G E+| Early fireworks - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.