Friday, Jul 25, 2008
The cynical Starr hearings were to their Watergate precursors as Jack Kevorkian is to Mother Teresa.
Nov 25, 1998 | This past week, 13 and a half months early, the millennium came to TV, in case you weren't paying attention -- and if you weren't, it's to your credit. This assumes you believe the millennium will be not the Rapture, accompanied by celestial chimes, but an abysmal journey down the drain of time, accompanied by a Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey duet. Millennial-TV began as Kangaroo Court-TV last Thursday and ended as Snuff-TV Sunday night, all the imagination and integrity and courage sucked out of our age like oxygen, leaving only a vacuum occupied by an electronic nation of the undead or, thanks to "60 Minutes," the dead, population of one.
I spent half of Sunday in dread of the "60 Minutes" program, having gotten it into my head that, for the purpose of writing this column, journalistic responsibility obligated me to watch Jack Kevorkian kill someone too pain-wracked and doomed to think clearly. Since "60 Minutes" happens to follow "Siskel and Ebert" in the TV market where I live, I figured this would surely put me in the appropriate thumbs-up/thumbs-down mood. But truth be told, by Sunday evening the idea of watching another minute of any sort of TV was almost unbearable, though to say I spent last Thursday watching the House Judiciary Committee perform a Kevorkian on my country would only be more cheap melodrama at a time when we hardly need another moment of it.
Our country didn't die last Thursday, of course, because the people are smarter than the Congress. But if you did happen to watch Ken Starr's testimony before the House committee holding hearings on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and if you also happened to be around 25 years ago during the Watergate hearings, you couldn't help discerning a difference or two. And if you weren't around 25 years ago you may find it hard to believe that once there was a time when momentous matters concerning democracy and due process weren't just seen by politicians as another opportunity to try to score politically, and when actually taking into account the best interests of the country wasn't just for suckers.
The Democrats of the present committee have made clear by now their resolute unwillingness to come to grips with the fact that the chief executive of the land is probably guilty of a felony in the form of perjury before a grand jury, and thereby has betrayed his oath of office. The Republicans of the present committee have made clear by now their resolute unwillingness to come to grips with the fact that virtually all the charges currently facing the president have been borne out of an investigation that has been, at best, zealous and unjust, and at worst vaguely totalitarian. There. I just saved you 15 hours in case you were so unhinged as to have taped the fiasco and were planning to curl around the fire with it some wintry night.
In the next day's newspaper, Bob Barr of Georgia, a member of the committee,
was quoted bemoaning the lack of objectivity on the part of his fellow Republicans who have indicated they won't support impeachment. "It's very frustrating to see my colleagues take such an irresponsible position," Barr told the Los Angeles Times. "We haven't even presented all the evidence." This paragon of open-mindedness is the same congressman who called for the president's impeachment before the Lewinsky scandal even broke. Presumably Barr originally believed impeachment was justified by the array of other scandals allegedly involving the president, including Whitewater and matters relating to the missing FBI files and the firings at the White House Travel Office. These were the matters that Starr was appointed to investigate in the first place, and that his testimony last Thursday mentioned just long enough to allow that the president in fact has been cleared of them, apparently at some mysterious, unspoken moment in the middle of some elusive, unspecified night that we can only guess happened a week ago or a month ago or a year ago or three.
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