Re: "The Seduction of a President" by Kenneth Starr

[Brookemail@xxxxxxx]

I have the greatest respect for your opinion, Richard. You're not only
knowledgeable on many subjects -- you're wise. You're absolutely right that
the Metastock list is the wrong forum for political debate -- or mud-slinging.
However, after reading all the notes attacking Clinton on the basis of Starr's
lurid examination of his sex life, I felt compelled to speak out. 

I'm deeply troubled by the division in this country right now -- and by the
Republicans' efforts to bring down a freely and fairly elected president. 

In a recent article in the New York Times, sociologist Orlando Patterson says
it well:

"To the nonlawyer's mind, which holds the highest principle of justice to be
fariness, Mr. Starr's expedient pursuit of the Lewinsky sex matter after three
years in which he failed to find any wrongdoing by the President in the
Whitewater episode smacks of precisely the kind of prosecutorial zealotry that
Hamilton most feared. If the personal life of the most powerful man in the
nation can be violated so wantonly by a Government-appointed prosecutor, then
we are all at risk. ... Americans have traditionally trusted the courts to
stand as the last barricade against intrusions of this kind. But now it
appears that any determined opponent can use the legal system to invade our
most intimate lives and that our prosecutors have almost limitless powers to
entrap us and to violate the most fundamental element of our freedom."

And: "The public's correct understanding of democracy parallels its concern
with the preservation of individual liberty. This explains why most Americans
still side with Mr. Clinton and against Mr. Starr. By objecting to publication
of details of the President's sex life, Americans have acknowledged that his
right to privacy justifies his attempt to conceal actions they consider to be
his business and no one else's. The disingenuousness of the President's
legalistic definition of sex is justificed by the equally transparent
disingenuousness of Mr. Starr's tactic of using Mr. Clinton's relationship
with Monica Lewinsky as a way of trapping him in a falsehood."

Now Rep. Henry J. Hyde, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says any efforts
to expose members of Congress to the same scrutiny applied to Clinton's
private life could lead to federal charges and imprisonment. 

This whole affair reminds one not of Watergate, but of McCarthyism.  

Brooke