Finally we know what makes Ken Starr tick. Rage. He's enraged that he's been outfoxed. The fury runs through the testimony he presented to the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, obscured though it was behind Starr's meticulous and dispassionate presentation.
In Starr's view, President Clinton just didn't play fair.
Clinton took polls, Starr complained. He gave strategic television interviews. Early on, he enlisted his friend, the Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, to help him craft a more forceful and effective denial of his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Worst of all, the president exercised his legal right, initially, not to appear before Starr's grand jury and to pursue rulings on legal privileges that arose from the unprecedented nature of Starr's probe. All to buy the time to make his case in the court of public opinion.
Among the sharp charges this independent counsel made to the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry on Thursday was this: Clinton endeavoured to "shape public opinion about the proper resolution of the entire matter".
He really does think the President should be impeached for spin.
At last we have heard from Starr himself and we can reach a conclusion about the man who has had the entire nation gasping in disbelief since January. He is, pretty much, what he seemed: Starr believes his own purity is as complete as Clinton's perfidy.
He is merely an officer of the court doing his statutory duty, the former federal judge told the panel Thursday. And Clinton? He is a wily ol' pol.
"I am not a man of polls, public relations or politics - which I suppose is obvious at this point," Starr offered.
And at another: "We go to court and not on the talk show circuit," said the witness who has had an army of conservative lawyers clog that circuit defending Starr's controversial tactics. The president's lawyer, David Kendall, later pointed out in his questioning that Starr's public relations man, Charles Bakaly, has appeared on 11 talk shows.
Nonetheless, you almost expected to hear Starr declare he was a simple country lawyer, unpractised in the wicked ways of Washington. This would be positively charming if it weren't so disingenuous.
Starr did not become conservative Washington's favourite lawyer - before now, on every Republican's lips as a potential Supreme Court nominee - by chasing fender-benders. He is as much an insider as the members of the panel he faced for hours on end, as much a fixer as the president's cronies. An untutored bumpkin he was not.
Even now, his office is under investigation for a months-long campaign of illegal leaks that set the tone and agenda for media coverage of the sex-and-lies probe from the beginning. The man who seethes at Clinton's masterful manipulation of the media may yet see his own staff indicted for it.
Starr cited as a stellar achievement his office's three-year probe of the late Vincent Foster's suicide.
No fewer than three official investigations by local and federal law-enforcement agencies had reached the conclusion, before Starr took office, that the former White House deputy counsel had taken his own life. But the freakiest of the right-wing fringe argued it was a murder in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were complicit.
"Over time, the controversy over the Foster tragedy has dissipated because we insisted on being uncompromisingly thorough," Starr declared with pride. Soothing the ire of nutty conspiracy theorists was a vital public-relations function Starr was happy to perform.
At some point, it just gets sad. That Starr has lost the biggest case of his career was painfully evident, even before the committee heard his first word.
The verdict could be seen in the piddling turnout of tourists and gawkers who straggled through the hallways of the Rayburn House Office Building. They said they'd come to watch history, although none offered that its desired course would be Clinton's removal from office.
The jurors already have spoken. Thursday was nothing more than Starr's turn at spin.
Marie Cocco is a political commentator for Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, and is based in Washington.