Editorials: Starr Power /The Dranesville Park Syndrome
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Starr Power Amid all the portentous rumbles about how Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr lost credibility in the Pepperdine matter, allow me to...
...Members of the Committee, consult your tailors and television coaches...
...Maybe it would not even be imprudent to hold a coffee in the White House with those Mafiosi willing to cough up for the president's defense fund...
...Consequently Dranesville Park is no longer just a park...
...Yet remember...
...Moreover, a third of the funds from it went to pay off Whitewater's Flowerwood Farm loan...
...The park slipped the grip of the heartless developer but fell into the grip of soulless government, entoiled as it always is in DPS...
...One can even understand why it grew under Richard Nixon and George Bush, though why it grew—albeit more moderately—under Ronald Reagan is a more complicated matter...
...One of my favorites is George Stephanopoulos...
...Contrary to the Clintons' wishful thinking, Starr has turned up plenty of incriminating evidence...
...Nearly a thousand FBI files have fallen into the hands of White House operatives...
...Perhaps his persistent memory lapses before Senator D'Amato's committee are why ABC has hired him as a commentator...
...Chairman Hyde, get a haircut...
...Noting that the park's parking lots could be enlarged, the park's politicians promised to enlarge them...
...This president had a grand old time down home...
...One might well ask why Big Government continues to get bigger...
...The paths had now all been mapped out...
...Before DPS, that which was fated to become the Scott's Run Nature Preserve was a forested area of a few square miles...
...Hikers must never step off the paths...
...The action will now turn to Capitol Hill...
...A parking lot was put in...
...The paper trail is well known...
...Noting that the park's paths get muddy in wet seasons and dark at night, they promised paved paths and night lighting...
...Hillary could be indicted for that little transaction...
...Government growth was being restrained in Northern Virginia...
...And there is that $300,000 loan that we have been hearing so much about...
...That is the dynamic at work at Scott's Run Nature Preserve and, incidentally, at i600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Starr has nothing on the White House...
...And facsimiles of the Governor's Mansion back in Little Rock will also be necessary...
...James McDougal and David Hale admit that Bill Clinton put the arm on Hale to make this fraudulent loan to his then partner (in more ways than one) Susan McDougal...
...After the New Deal no such consensus on the limitations of government survived except amongst libertarian purists...
...It was only a matter of time before they promised increased security...
...A building developer threatened to butcher and blacktop it...
...As Byron York explained in the December number of The American Spectator and Terry Eastland later explained in the Wall Street Journal, the Constitution and precedent demand that a sitting president not be indicted but rather subjected to the political process...
...Guess again...
...Yet as the national barometer housed at i600 Pennsylvania Avenue intoned last year, "The era of Big Government is over...
...Nature lovers were free to walk along the park's paths and peer out on the C Potomac River, the park's k northern border...
...The Founding Fathers' admonitions on "limited government" echoed through the decades, and so both citizens and pols usually viewed government as a useful institution that had to be restrained...
...Possibly in future installments of The Godfather Mario Puzo will be using a facsimile of the White House as scenery...
...Yet there will also be seedy Little Rock apartment houses, trailer parks, and possibly the emergency rooms of various Arkansas hospitals...
...That means impeachment...
...His chances of avoiding further indictments are not good...
...But his performance before D'Amato does recommend him for perjury charges...
...Now it is a Nature Preserve, and it is not even the Dranesville Park Nature Preserve but rather the Scott's Run Nature Preserve...
...Of course, while the Judiciary Committee is at work indictments could still be handed down against some of our favorite administration operatives...
...It commenced by wrenching the equality symbol from the Declaration of Independence and perverting that symbol into an instrument for constructing the egalitarian New Jerusalem...
...A tax was passed and the local government purchased the land from the developer...
...Government grew from the New Deal on because influential Americans believed that Big Government solved many of mankind's problems...
...And finally I like Webb Hubbell...
...Probably the park will hire park police, then park garbage collectors...
...It has no conception of "sin," "evil," and "tragedy," nor does it concede the imperfectibility of the human condition...
...It suffers DPS and is ceaselessly promising to do more...
...The other day while walking through the park I discovered that its governors had gone ahead with the bridges...
...dici The Dranesville Park Syndrome 18 April r997 The American Spectator...
...There is also Joshua Steiner, the Treasury Department official who, when caught in discrepancies Columnist and contrarian William Safire had it just so when he appraised our Boy President's so-called balanced budget a "fraud" in the New York Times...
...Ai is controlled by government, and government in our time is never satisfied with its original mandate...
...The end of Big Government, indeed...
...were just too many temptations for a party kind of guy...
...Call it the Dranesville Park Syndrome (DPS...
...Those governing the park ceaselessly promise to do more, at times actually endangering their original mandate...
...Anyone interested in the Clinton scandals knows that the office of the Independent Counsel has at its disposal information of corruption that is amazing...
...The edicts seemed stern and inflexible...
...So why does government continue to grow...
...Good sense prevailed...
...Though all the commentators who have been pronouncing Mr...
...Or was it...
...Up until the New Deal most Americans believed that there were many things government ought not to do, even park government...
...The news stories have already revealed that the Clintons keep unsavory company...
...Perhaps Dranesville smacked of racism, male chauvinism, speciesism, or some other villainy from our sordid past...
...Fortunately the locals again leapt to action...
...Their compassion worsened and they promised to convoy sufferers in from the inner city...
...They reminded the politicians that the park's ecology could not sustain all this progress and compassion...
...rather it argues that human nature is wholly malleable, and that the perfected good life is attainable through institutional and environmental manipulation...
...Indictment comes later...
...They saved the park from the paving, the lighting, the lavatories, and the enlarged parking lots...
...The maps were sealed in plastic and placed on pedestals along the paths...
...I suggest that Hillary ring up Mafia Don John Gotti at whatever federal hoosegow he now resides in and inquire about the availability of the Don's consiglieri...
...His mistake was to bring his Arkansas ways to Washington...
...The newspapers have already published the names of convicted felons, members of the Russian mafia, and Chinese agents who have attended similar fund-raisers there...
...Hence DPS transformed the federal government from an enterprise of a few limited functions to an enterprise of $1.4 trillion when Clinton became president and an enterprise of $i.8 trillion when he leaves...
...The FBI has been used to intimidate private citizens...
...I live right alongside this woodsy enclave in Northern Virginia and have observed a dynamic at work that explains the park's constant state of flux and, I now conclude, the growth of the federal government—the politicians' statements to the contrary notwithstanding...
...Starr a failure seem to be ignorant of legal opinion and precedent, Starr, for one, knows that the indictment of a sitting president is awkward business...
...What about the discarded bottles and other debris I habitually lug away...
...Today most Democrats and Republicans insist that they agree...
...She need not worry about the public relations problem she might suffer from hiring a lawyer from organized crime...
...And columnist and ultracontrarian Don Lambro had it just so, too, when he pronounced our Boy President's balanced budget an exercise in big and burgeoning government in the Washington Times—also known by Washington's cheerful minority as the Good Times...
...The parkbetween his testimony to the D'Amato Committee and his diary, claimed that he lied to his diary...
...Soon Starr is going to be handing the Judiciary Committee a bundle of probative evidence embracing a prodigious array of felonies, misdemeanors, and stupidities committed by our big lovable lug of a president, graduate of Yale Law, professor at the University of Arkansas Law School, but governor of Arkansas during a period when there Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...The White House is wrong...
...Suffering the compassion hex, they promised public lavatories, some sort of fencing lest hikers fall into the Potomac, and inscrutable bridges across God knows what...
...As Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation has pointed out, there is evidence of tax evasion, bank fraud, selling government jobs, obstruction of justice, perjury, false statements, and conspiracy...
...The Clinton defense is going to need big money, and with ordinary Democrats growing squeamish, mobsters might be a ready alternative...
...Some even chained themselves to the trees...
...Taxes will be increased...
...25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator Twentieth-century liberalism is the contemporary expression of that tradition which doggedly pursues equality...
...The locals flew into high dudgeon...
...Nor are they allowed to pick things up from the ground...
...Possibly I am in breach of the law...
...Starr Power Amid all the portentous rumbles about how Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr lost credibility in the Pepperdine matter, allow me to file a polite demurral...
...Driven on with this mind's eye view of the perfected egalitarian utopia, the liberal tradition becomes restive, anxious, and on occasion fanatical when society seems impervious and indifferent to its hortatory, and when its Tower of Babel begins to reveal cracks and imperfections...
...Members of the House Judiciary Committee had best be ready...
...Moreover, the pedestals now bear rules on how to walk the paths...
...One can understand why government repeatedly grew in the years of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society...
...John P East, "History's Entrails" APRIL 1972 16 April r 9 97 • The American Spectator Anyone with that bad a memory could not possibly approach current affairs with preconceived bias...
...At least one Arkansas state trooper witnessed Clinton prevailing on Hale, and now there is evidence that Hillary was in on the loan...
...And the commentators, all in solemn agreement that Whitewater is over, are wrong too...
...This tradition is secular in its philosophical foundations...
Vol. 30 • April 1997 • No. 4
