For more than a decade the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Virginia has collected the most outrageous quotes from the past year. Many of the quotes had to do with the impeachment proceedings. Today I thought I would focus on two people who were especially critical of Kenneth Starr.
One of those critics was James Carville who said, "Can Ken Starr ignore the apparent breadth of the sympathetic response to the president's speech? Facially, it finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses. If he now pursues the president of the United States, who, however flawed his apology was, came out and invoked God, family, his daughter, a political conspiracy and everything but the kitchen sink, would not there be some sort of comparison to a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor for Mr. Starr?"
James Carville has probably never been known for understatement, but comparing the independent prosecutor to a Nazi war criminal was a bit much. Kenneth Starr and his family put up with so much criticism in 1998. No wonder he would like to leave all of this for a private life.
But before I end let me also quote from Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Big Show" as he was talking to Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau Chief James Warren. "The best chance for Clinton to shine in history might be for Congress to force him to pay the price for lying about sex. . . . Clinton would become martyr to a legal system run amok. His defeat would mean victory over not just sheet-sniffing prosecutors but all those who would criminalize politics with endless investigations."
Although many were critical of Kenneth Starr's investigation, I believe history will be more kind to him that his contemporary critics. It certainly couldn't be any worse.
I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.
© 1998 Probe Ministries International