No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Where Was the Press? Joining Starr in his Fake Moralistic Crusade against Clinton.

Richard Cohen asks the real question about the Starr investigation and the Clinton impeachment: How is it that the Press got so caught up by the illegal media leaks orchestrated to bring down the President by a moralistic prig of a partisan Independent Prosecutor who was unable to differentiate between sin and crime?

Cohen points out that Blumenthal's book has been given to the Clinton haters in the media to review.

I can tell you that he pulls together his own experience of the period, some original interviews and a synthesis of what has been written about the time to provide an excellent view of what was going on. Blumenthal is an excellent writer, and the book is gripping. It should be widely read - and the Republicans and much of the media really, really don't want you to. They do not come off well in the book.

Samuel Dash, Starr's ethics counselor in the book characterizes the special prosecutor as a morally obsessed inquisitor. "He lacked a lot of judgment," Dash told Blumenthal. "Starr didn't see the difference between a sin and a crime. His judgments were distorted." Dash says that Starr could have ended his investigation much earlier than he did. He had, really, nothing.

Blumenthal makes a good case that Starr's office was leaking reports from Grand Jury proceedings (a federal crime) to build media pressure against Clinton when Starr was unable to find any evidence that a crime had occurred. Reporters such as Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post would report the skewed and unflattering leaked material together with predictions that Starr was about to bring the criminal indictment. Then when the truth was clear and starr's lies exposed, such reporters would ignore it or gloss over it for fear of losing access to the leakers in Starr's office.

Ultimately Starr was never able to find evidence of any crime, and had to take a pornographic report of alleged sex to Congress to try to Impeach Clinton. The Republican majority of the House was unable to do anything except vote for impeachment since they were so invested in the whole business of Clinton-hating and dominated by the likes of Newt Gringrich, Dan Burton, Dick Armey and Tom Delay.

So why does that matter today? Again the media is trapped by its desire for access to official leaks. That is why you are seeing so little reporting on the way Bush bamboozled the US into its first preemptive war on a nation that was not threatening us.

Read Cohen's review. Then buy and read "The Clinton Wars."

posted by Richard at 2:59 PM