Saturday, November 28, 1998

Farce winds down to a dying smirk

By Donald Kaul

The nation was subjected to 11 straight hours of the Conservative smirk last week, and no one reported an increase in suicides around the country. It proves we're an emotionally stable people.

The smirk was Ken Starr's, of course, on display at his trial before the House Judiciary Committee. Oh, I know, they called it impeachment hearings, but the name of Bill Clinton, who figures to be the guest-of-honor at any impeachment, was hardly mentioned. Instead, the Democrats on the committee chased Starr around the room, trying to make him look like Torquemada, while the Republicans fell over themselves attempting to portray him as St. Francis of Assisi.

Whenever the Democrats looked as though they were about to muss Starr's hair, Chairman Henry Hyde would step in and rescue him. At the end of the long day, although he lied like a Clinton, Starr had survived, as had his conservative smirk.

The conservative smirk is that little upturn of the corners of the mouth bespeaking a smug sense of superiority. Most conservatives -- Milton Friedman, George Will, William Kristol -- have one. Linda Chavez is the Mona Lisa of conservative smirkers. It's their way of telling you they're smarter than you are without having to prove it.

Starr has a beauty. You want to walk up to him and slap it off his face. I knew guys like him in grade school. They were always the ones who sat at the front of the class and would rat you out to the teacher.

As theater, the hearings were about a quart low on dramatic intensity. As solemn proceedings designed to investigate the wrongdoings of a president, they were a farce. You don't hold an investigation and call only one witness -- the prosecutor.

What they were was what the procedure has been all along, a political knife fight. It has nothing to do with law and less to do with the Constitution. The Republicans want to bring down Clinton for their political advantage, and the Democrats are trying to stop them. So far, the Democrats seem to be having the better time of it.

One thing became very clear at the hearing, however: Ken Starr's investigation was far from an even-handed, objective look into the facts of the president's actions. It was instead a relentless inquiry in search of a crime, any crime, committed by the president, carried to the point of entrapment.

It was amusing to hear Henry Hyde claim that Starr was not a special "prosecutor," but instead a "counsel." Why then did Starr, every time he was challenged on his methods, brag about his staff of "professional career prosecutors?"

He was and is a prosecutor; more's the pity. Rather than giving the president the benefit of any doubt, he resolved all doubt in favor of guilt. Moreover, he bent every rule of ethical prosecutorial behavior to bully witnesses into helping him make his case. His staff violated grand jury secrecy to leak information that was damaging to the president, all the while downplaying information that might be favorable to him.

It was the kind of investigation one imagines being aimed at a Mafia kingpin, someone the prosecutor knows (but can't prove) is guilty of a thousand crimes, so the prosecutor goes all out to nail him for a lesser offense. Starr thinks Clinton is Al Capone. His report is a hatchet job.

Which doesn't mean Clinton's not guilty. It has become increasingly obvious that he lied under oath. Oh, he was cute about it, drawing semantic distinctions that only a lawyer could love, but it doesn't disguise the fact that he didn't tell the truth when asked about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

The real question is -- and this would have been a more fruitful line of inquiry for the committee -- does that lying constitute the "high crimes and misdemeanors" necessary for impeachment?

If you think all perjury is the same, maybe it does. But if you kill someone you can be charged either with first degree murder, second degree murder and manslaughter. There are different degrees of guilt in killing someone but not in perjury? That doesn't make sense.

I suspect if you think Clinton should be impeached for what he did, you probably wanted to impeach him before he did it.

So let's stop the circus and have a vote, already. The clowns are beginning to look tired.

E-mail Donald Kaul at otcoffee@aol.com or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services. Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.