Starrism

Beginning of article

Everyone from Alan Dershowitz to a front-page classified advertiser in the New York Times has sounded the alarm about "sexual McCarthyism" in connection with Kenneth Starr, his report and all the rest.

The word "McCarthyism," as many have pointed out [see Navasky, "Dialectical McCarthyism(s)," July 20], is a misnomer since it describes a phenomenon that began before the junior senator from Wisconsin arrived on the scene and persisted after he was retired from it. And each time this umbrella term for the excesses of the anti-Communist crusade is recycled as a metaphor for the latest political mugging, it loses something of its original power and precision as a description of a social pathology.

Moreover, in the case of Starr & Co. the metaphor seems inexact because McCarthy was notorious for the sloppiness of his methods, the manipulation of numbers (first there were 205, then fifty-seven, then eighty-one card-carrying Communists in the State Department) and, as …