![]() ![]() ![]() Still, the needle just won’t budge on Linda Tripp, who is facing prosecution for illegal wiretapping in the state of Maryland and hasn’t been allowed back to work. Hillary Clinton’s public-approval numbers skyrocket, Bill’s presidency has popular support, and Monica owns a healthy share of America’s sympathies. Two months after Starr releases his report, the House Judiciary Committee uploads the Tripp tapes in their entirety - a move that doesn’t have the desired effect. So personal that Hillary doesn’t even need to be asked not to read it.Īnd then comes the audio-version drop, narrated by Monica and Linda themselves. This isn’t about the law, his team will argue. No one deserves this, and yet the gross extremes of the Starr Report’s invasion into her privacy will become the bedrock for Bill Clinton’s defense. How else can it be possible that Chelsea is reading about her dad’s sex life in a sunny Stanford library at the same time Matt Drudge screams at the AOL guy in the pitch-black Los Angeles morning while, on the East Coast, Ann is swilling ice-cold Chablis and manifesting Bill’s inevitable resignation? Why did Monica tell these guys so much, and why did Ken include every last morsel of it? What is even happening? Ken Starr has broken the internet and possibly also spacetime. On cable news, anchors are literally just reading the report out loud, word for word. Ann Coulter is gleeful at the degree of prurient detail, George Conway likes it fine but wishes there was more legal stuff, and Marcia Lewinsky warns Monica’s dad, Bernie, not to open it all. Yes, Bill Clinton is forced to read the full story of his affair online, along with the rest of the world. Ken tells his boys he’s proud of the smutty ledger it’s taken them four years to compile, then drops the report off on Congress’s doorstep without allowing the White House the courtesy of a sneak peek. It’s September 1998 when the episode begins, and the frat brothers at the Special Prosecutor’s office are still arguing over the porniest bits of the report even after their boss sends it to the printers. ![]() ![]() But here we are! The tenth and final episode of Impeachment, a show that, never mind the title, managed to mention impeachment only slightly more often than the Starr Report, which uses the word less often than it uses the word “cigar.” Or is it the actual impeachment of Bill Clinton, a moment of little political or actual significance beyond the Beltway? In its final 90 minutes, Impeachment is, at times, a hyperbolic version of itself: The camera chases the ensemble cast around the country as if on a great time-jumping tour of American living rooms, the dim sets achieve Rembrandt’s level of chiaroscuro, and the score grows so tense and pulpy that my husband asked me why I was watching Law & Order in the middle of the day. Starr in Conformity with the Requirement of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c)? Is it Monica Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair spread, the one in which she dresses up as Marilyn Monroe alongside some of the most styleless photo captions Graydon Carter ever published? ( Case in point: “As the star of the Starr report she went down in history as the woman who went down on - well, the rest of the sentence writes itself.”) Is there a logical culmination to all this scheming and taping and testifying? Is it the secret drop of the Starr Report, formally known by its much sexier name, Referral from Independent Counsel Kenneth W. The tenth and final episode of Impeachment is here, and I’m just now realizing that I have no clue which specific moment in U.S. ![]()
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