Word: starr
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...There was not a lot of confidence in the probity of the White House," says one. "There was a long experience with its not being forthcoming and truthful." Starr claims the experience didn't change him, but the evidence contradicts him, and so do many of his friends and allies. They say he became tougher, more aggressive, more willing to assume the worst about Clinton and his people. "The impact was almost unavoidable," says a Starr associate. "You're less likely to...give people the benefit of the doubt." Starr became less deferential, summoning Hillary Clinton to the grand jury...
That wasn't just Bennett's customary gravitas. It was the sound of conservatism in despair, a bewildered keening that could just as easily have come from Gary Bauer or Robert Bork or William Kristol. All year the political right awaited the moment when everyone would agree that Ken Starr's investigation was the institutional expression of a national consensus, namely that the President's relationship with Lewinsky was not simply wrong but criminal. That means it was something that it was the proper business of government to discover, interrogate, rip to pieces, expose and punish. What happened of course...
...Republican Party. But the more influential voices on the right these days are bleaker. They see America becoming a cesspit of promiscuity and godlessness and blue dresses with who knows what on them, a place where some sexual interludes have to be specified as being "in person," as the Starr report does, so you can distinguish them from the ones you might have, say, over the phone...
Considered that way, the nation's failure to rally around Starr is further proof of the general moral decay. It used to be an article of faith among conservatives that the natural goodness of the American people would be unleashed once we got the government off our backs. (Remember Newt Gingrich?) Lately, however, conservatives find themselves entertaining the opposite thought, that we have all become so heedless and self-regarding that we can no longer be relied upon to make moral judgments. This summer James Dobson, the Christian radio broadcaster, was all but calling for a new American people...
...moralists misunderstand two things. One is that Starr's rejection by most Americans was itself an ironic triumph of conservatism. For the past 50 years the right has claimed that government can't perform most public purposes, whether those might be educating kids, caring for the poor or buying toilet seats for aircraft carriers at popular prices. This was an attack that started, of course, in the antigovernment rhetoric of the 1960s left. In the '90s Gingrich and his House revolutionaries consolidated that critique and focused it on Congress, assuring us that the place was a ship of fools...