Word: starr
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...difficult because every actor in the production played a preassigned role in a drama with a preordained ending. And because Starr--though he tried to portray himself as an earnest public servant guided only by his reverence for the law--couldn't help veering, sometimes coyly, into political finger wagging. In the middle of his sober presentation there was Starr embracing the three Democratic Senators--Pat Moynihan, Bob Kerrey and Joe Lieberman--who had dared go to the floor in August to say that Clinton's private behavior was a public offense...
...also difficult for Americans to invest in the spectacle because committee members, Republicans and Democrats alike, checked all pretense of impartiality in the cloakroom, with Democrats aiming a fusillade of sneers at Republican chairman Henry Hyde within minutes of the opening gavel and with Hyde clapping approvingly as Starr left the room 12 hours later. What should have been an uplifting display of American democracy at work had become so tedious and so illegitimate to the Americans who bothered to tune in that even Starr suggested he might rather be elsewhere. If not for his commitment to duty, the witness...
...Starr's pining for the quiet life was part of his attempt to appear inoffensive, just a purveyor of evidence who is eager to retreat from Washington's partisan wars. And to the extent that he remained genial and G-rated throughout most of the day, mentioning the words sex and sexual only four times in his opening remarks and prefacing his comments deferentially with "you may disagree with me," or "I want to be fair," he succeeded. But presenting himself as the Mister Rogers of the Washington legal elite did not aid Starr in his bigger task--persuading anyone...
...Starr's problem was not his outbursts, of which there were few, but a vanity he had trouble concealing. At intervals during the course of the day, he compared himself to both the Lone Ranger and George Washington, and he wrapped himself in Justice Louis Brandeis when he insisted that he too was a servant of "facts, facts, facts." Over and over he said that Congress had to rely on its own "judgment" in deciding whether to impeach--a fact so obvious that the more he said it the more it sounded as if he had trouble believing...
...Dash, for one, made it clear last week that he doesn't think Starr really believes it. On Friday morning Dash, a Democrat who was the chief counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee 24 years ago, resigned as Starr's $400-an-hour ethics adviser, saying Starr's performance had convinced him that the independent counsel had "unlawfully intruded on the power of impeachment which the Constitution gives solely to the House." Because Dash, who was regarded within the independent counsel's office as pompous and temperamental, is a venerated Democrat, he was a valuable asset to Starr. During...