Michael Tackett’s front page editorial-as-news on Kenneth Starr’s political problems (Feb. 28) was disingenuous.
Tackett presented Starr as an honorable but politically naive man whose conscientious legal efforts to root out the crimes of the president are being unfairly thwarted by savvy opponents using political weapons.
The truth is that Starr is a sophisticated and ruthless attorney who has been using the legal system in an unseemly political vendetta against the president. The proof of the political nature of his motivation is that he has failed to conclude his investigation, despite having little to show in the way of significant results, after years of spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. If Starr’s intentions were honorable, he would have brought his investigation to a close long ago.
The president’s supporters are justified in using political weapons in an essentially political struggle, in which Starr has used unethical leaks to the news media and has tried to silence his critics by intimidation, through use of his subpoena power. Starr is not, as Tackett would have us believe, a good guy who “brought a knife to a gunfight.” He is a bad guy who brought a gun to a knife fight but can’t find any live ammunition. He is trying to bully his way out by firing blanks.
