JEFFREY ROSEN IN THE NEW YORKER ON HOW STARR AND HIS CREW USE SEXUAL DETAILS TO TAR CLINTON:
Sexual details weigh too heavily in the minds of the public, so that they don't consider whether the legal requirements for an offense have been met. "Graphic sexual material can make people angry and irrational. They may end up with a negative view not only of Clinton, but also of Lewinsky, or Starr, of Congress, of the press, and of government in general, which has dangerously exceeded its proper bounds by allowing the public sphere to overwhelm the private.":
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/9634/newyorker092898rosen.html

ADAM GOPNIK IN THE NEW YORKER ON STARR'S "PORNOGRAPHY FOR PURITANS":
"Like Poe far more than like Melville, this text--whose tone recalls "The Tell-Tale Heart" (the throbbing organ that keeps the narrator uneasily awake) and "The Cask of Amontillado" (all those windowless rooms!)--uses an obsessional voice to tell what is, in all other ways, a relentlessly ordinary story of adultery. A supposedly dispassionate account of a man's sins becomes so overwrought that the reader gradually realizes that the point of the story is not that the hero is wicked but that the narrator is mad." The ultimate literary analysis of "The Report":
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/9634/newyorker092898gopnik.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, ON MEDIEVAL INQUISITOR STARR'S "PROSECUTORIAL OVERKILL," STARR'S VENOMOUS ANTI-CLINTON TIRADES EVEN BEFORE BEING NAMED INDEPENDENT COUNSEL. ETC.:

The independent counsel's 445-page report to congress, packed with almost pornographic sexual detail and damning commentary on the President's motives, is the most glaring example of prosecutorial overkill, some of Mr. Starr's associates acknowledge.
But there have been others--the parading of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton past a phalanx of cameras into the Federal courthouse in Washington in January 1996; the threat, leaked to reporters, to name Bruce R. Lindsay, the President's closest confidant, an unindicted co-conspirator in a trial that ended in speedy acquittals; the ostentatious display of the 36 boxes of impeachment evidence on the steps of the Capitol last week; the harsh treatment of the President in his Aug. 17 videotaped grand jury testimony.
"I thought from Day One, as I think today, that this was bad for the country," said one of Mr. Starr's defenders who now questions his tactics. "Sometimes you have to exercise prosecutorial discretion." Even though this defender of Mr. Starr said he believed the President wa guilty of significant misconduct, he said, "the cost to the country far outweighs the value of proving it."
[....]
Mr. Clinton and his place in history are in jeopardy. Mr. Starr's reputation is in tatters. It was, said one former White House lawyer, a "mutual suicide."
[....]
James Carville claims in his coming book about Mr. Starr, "...And the Horse He Rode In On," that he had an encounter with Mr. Starr almost a year before he was appointed Whitewater independent counsel, replacing a moderate Republican, Robert B. Fiske.
Mr. Carville, one of Mr. Clinton's closest political associates, says in the book that he met Mr. Starr in October 1993, in the USAir Airport, although at the time he had no idea who Mr. Starr was. Mr. Carville recalled that a a stranger walked up to him and "started spouting an unsolicited and shameful tirade against the President."
"Your boy's getting rolled," Mr. Carville said the stranger said ominously to him before walking away."
[....]
[Jane C. Sherborne, a former deputy White House counsel, on Clinton's outrage at Starr's blithe damaging of countless lives.] "He felt a deep sense of outrage about how Starr was trampling through the lives of really tangential witnesses in Arkansas."

STEPHEN GREENBLATT ON HOW MEDIEVAL INQUISITOR STARR HAS PRODUCED NOT THE WARM COMEDY OF BOCCACCIO OR CHAUCER OR FIELDING, NOT THE COMPASSIONATE TRAGEDY OF FLAUBERT OR CHEKHOV, BUT A COLD, CLINICAL, DOCUMENT OUT OF THE MIDDLE AGES:

The nausea provoked by these details may provide the key to the genre of this narrative. The only other texts I know that include comparable details -- cold, clinical accounts of humans stripped of all the protective covering with which we contrive to cloak our nakedness -- are the legal documents of the witchcraft trials in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, trials that extended in America well into the 17th century.

Prosecutors and judges in those trials were so certain the alleged crimes posed a danger to society, so convinced the accused were absolutely evil, so determined to achieve the public finality of conviction and execution, that they violated every principle of equity, respect, ordinary common sense and decency. Mothers were threatened with imprisonment if they did not testify against their daughters, friends were turned into spies, families were destroyed. Laws were twisted to allow judicial torments undreamed of by their framers, and the most intimate spaces in the community, the home and the body itself were ruthlessly violated and exposed to common view. Since the enemy was thought to be Satan, all measures were justified.

Conveniently, the legal proceedings themselves produced exactly the evidence the inquisitors were feverishly seeking. The accused were publicly stripped and shaved and searched with minute attention until the "witch's mark" was discovered, and, under enough pressure, the confessions tumbled out.

The report's closest analog is not "Tom Jones," "Lolita" or "The Story of O." It is the "Malleus Maleficarum" -- "The Hammer of Witches" -- by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprengerr.

The Starr report is our version of the documents that proudly published these confessions. It is not finally about sex or even about perjury. It is about the power of narrative to expose everything, about the ripping away of dignity and respect, about what unleashed and merciless state authorities can do to a person, even to the President himself.

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of literature
at Harvard, and the general editor of "The
Norton Shakespeare," in the New York Times,
September 22, 1998.

GREENBLATT'S ESSAY IN ITS ENTIRETY:
"A Story Told With Evil Intent":
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/9634/nyt092298greenblatt.html

DAVID E. ROSENBAUM IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ABOUT MEDIEVAL INQUISITOR STARR'S CONCEALMENT OF EXCULPATORY EVIDENCE IN HIS "REPORT":
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/9634/nyt092298rosenbaum.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES ANALYSIS OF MEDIEVAL INQUISITOR STARR'S REPORT:

"It is the way the report marshals and characterizes the information it presents that converts it into an aggressive piece of legal advocacy. Few of the factual assertions are left to speak for themselves. 'The President's linguistic parsing is unreasonable,' the report says of Mr. Clinton's struggle to avoid acknowledging the sexual nature of the relationship. At many other points, the report characterizes the President's testimony as deceptive, 'not plausible,' or defying 'common sense.'
"In short, this is a document with attitude. It serves up a worst-case scenario: conversations that some might find inconclusive, ambiguous, or at worst suggestive, like the exchanges between the President and Betty Currie, his secretary, in the period surrounding Mr. Clinton's deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual misconduct civil lawsuit, are characterized as a criminal obstruction of justice.
[....]
"Prosecutors considering seeking criminal indictments typically prepare in-house memorandums outlining a potential case, much as Mr. Starr has done here. But those memorandums usually contain a section that the Starr report conspicuously omits--a frank discussion of possible defenses to the accusations and of vulnerabilities in the prosecution's case.
[....]
"[T]his report is notable for its failure to acknowledge that there might be more than one way to view at least some of the evidence."

RICHARD H. PILDES, A CONSTITUTIONAL LAW EXPERT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LAW SCHOOL, ON MEDIEVAL INQUISITOR STARR'S REPORT:
"There are some aspects of it that make it read like the almost fanatical zeal of a Medieval inquisitor."