Word: starrs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...some ways, Starr was remade by his prey. Four years of chasing Clinton--hunting for wrongdoing in Whitewater and its tributaries, butting heads against the Clinton stonewall--changed the man. He and his lieutenants apparently became persuaded that they were dealing with a kind of ongoing criminal enterprise. The more Clinton stalled, the more Starr pushed. The more Starr pushed, the more Clinton stalled. And in the end, each drove the other to a kind of madness. It's a subject Starr's friends discuss gingerly...
...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...