Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 16:34:23 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: Edward W. Said: The president and the baseball player  (fwd)




		The president and the baseball player
			By Edward W. Said 

 Now that most of the Starr Report has been released and read by people all
over the world, one can stand back a little and try to make sense of this
quite extraordinary episode in American history. The fact is, first of all,
that there is simply no precedent for it whatsoever. The Independent
Prosecutor Act, by which Congress established the office of a special
investigator for executive branch misdemeanours, is hardly a decade old, and
the kind of powers it gives this prosecutor are virtually unlimited. So no
president has been so intimately investigated as Clinton, and it is likely
no one ever will be again. For the first time in history, the American
public has been virtually inundated with detail about the President's
private life, not just information from the Starr report. For the past nine
months the media -- unprecedented in its power and reach -- has bombarded
everyone who can read, listen to radio, or watch television with literally
innumerable stories, speculations, reports and interviews concerning
Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Janet Tripp, David Kendall, plus the whole immense
cast of players in this outrageous farce. Yet perhaps the most egregious
aspect of the story has been the prying into an individual's private life
without limits set either by law or by taste. The idea that even a US
president -- arguably the most powerful person on earth -- should not be
immune to this kind of vicarious prurience is frightening, but that indeed
is what has happened. Despite this, however, the polls show that a majority
of Americans still seem to believe that, no matter how gruesome or unsavory
the details of Clinton's private life, they approve of his performance on
the job for the time being. 

   There is no doubt, however, that things have changed with the actual
availability of the Starr Report. Having read most of it myself, I am
satisfied in concluding that it has become exclusively an indictment of the
president's sexual behaviour with a White House intern, and says absolutely
not one word about the Clinton family's financial dealings in the Whitewater
affair in Arkansas almost twenty years ago. But it was precisely that
scandal, real or supposed, that Kenneth Starr was appointed to investigate.
Having found nothing there, Starr went more or less on his own to find
nothing in any of the subsequent complications to Whitewater -- the suicide
of Vince Foster, or the firing of the White House travel staff, or the
paying off of Webster Hubbell, all of them supposedly tied directly to
Whitewater. There is, therefore, no mention of any of these matters in the
report, which, once again, was supposed to have been about only them. We now
know that, over a period of four years, Kenneth Starr and his office have
spent no less than $40 million for their investigation, with no limits or
observable accountability set to their expenditures. As someone who suffers
from leukaemia, I would have wished that those $40 million could have been
available for research on cancer rather than for inquiring into Clinton's
rather boring and tawdry sexual tastes. 

   The main contention made by Starr is, of course, that the President lied
to the courts and the people of the United States: hence the charge of
perjury -- supposedly one



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