DATE: Sunday, July 13, 1997                 TAG: 9707100201

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   65 lines

STAFF CAN'T RUBBER-HOSE ALL OF US... OR CAN HE?

What with all the really interesting stuff going on in space, it was no surprise that a news update on America's one true alien creature slipped through the media cracks last week. If you missed it, here's what it said:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Whitewater investigators are focusing on work done for the Teamsters by current White House counsel Charles Ruff and a private detective who worked for the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, sources say.

Two people close to Teamsters Local 337 in Detroit said an FBI agent working for Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr sought records of payments by Teamsters headquarters to Ruff's law firm. As a private lawyer, Ruff assisted the union's anti-corruption efforts.

Got that? Right. Neither did I.

You remember Kenneth Starr. Sure you do. He's the special prosecutor who set out years ago to prove that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in an illegal loan connected to a cheesy Arkansas land deal a couple of decades back. Or something like that.

Three years and $30 million taxpayer dollars later, having bagged a couple of fringe players on charges of mopery, Ken Starr is now riffling through the files of Detroit Teamsters Local 337, looking for a Whitewater connection.

Like my boss said: ``Well, you wanna shoot ducks, you go where the ducks are.''

Would somebody please throw Ken Starr a rope? This guy is drowning.

The week before, you'll recall, Starr's gumshoes were running around Arkansas trying to find out if some woman or another had a baby that ``looked like'' Bill Clinton. (If she did, do you suppose she'd be showing him off in public?) The rationale was that this woman might at one time or another have heard Bill Clinton whisper something about bank regulation.

There is one good thing to say about Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation: It kept him from being appointed to prosecute Timothy McVeigh. If that had happened, every farm boy who'd ever rented a Ryder truck to haul a rusted engine block to the dump would be ``under threat of indictment.'' Starr's agents would be trying to track the obvious connections between McVeigh, Lizzie Borden and the Roswell UFO incident of 1947. Every cow in the country would be in front of a grand jury to determine if any of its poop had turned up in the fertilizer McVeigh was hauling.

Timothy McVeigh would have had the first preliminary hearing in history to be postponed due to rigor mortis.

They made several books and one pretty fair movie out of the Watergate investigation of the '70s. Can you imagine what a book on Whitewater would look like? It would eat roughly the same shelf space as an Encyclopaedia Britannica. A movie would cause Siskel and Ebert to have both thumbs amputated. The screenwriters could save a lot of effort by lifting the dialogue from ``Moby Dick,'' an earlier obsessive pursuit of a great white whale.

They say there are only six degrees of separation between all of us - meaning that you probably know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows the president.

If that's true, you're likely to be hauled in for questioning any day now.

I'll probably already be there, as I know somebody - worse, a female person - who actually fast-danced with Bill Clinton to the old R&B hit, ``Stagger Lee.'' Which means they likely rubbed legs, which means a subpoena probably will be nailed to my door by the time I get home tonight.

If I see you in the Whitewater grand-jury waiting room and you have to pretend you don't know me, that's OK. I'll understand. We're all in this together.

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