Susan McDougal

Robert Scheer’s May 12 Column Left, “Talk or Face the Starr Treatment,” bespeaks cruel and unusual punishment handed to Susan McDougal. It’s as though we’ve reentered the “red scare” of the 1940s and ‘50s period, sans the blacklisting, but renaming it “Tell All About Bill Clinton or Pay an Insurmountable Bill.”

Shackles, wire cages, solitary, taunts, denial of exercise, chains: Starr has retreated to some time long ago when punishment was cruel but not unusual. It hurts to even believe that such treatment exists today.

JERRY ARONOW, West Hollywood

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How I, too, weep for McDougal. Lord, what a meany that Kenneth Starr is. Heavens! Here is the very flower of Southern womanhood and the very symbol of pride in our fair republic in chains!

Don’t say a word, honey. Just don’t say a word. After all, it’d be a lie, just like Scheer says. And we don’t want you convicted of that again. I mean, how many more fraud convictions can you handle before you just break in half?

Lord, is there any wonder that I fear for the future of this fair land?

RICHARD HUBER, Santa Monica

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I am shocked at the treatment McDougal is receiving, according to Scheer. If our law says she must be in prison, so be it, but she should be treated as a human being. What happened to human rights in America?

JOHN ALLEN, Pacific Palisades

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Is not Starr suborning perjury, a crime with which he is seeking to charge the president? Is it not implicit that he is doing so when he negotiates immunity from prosecution with Monica Lewinsky? He demands that Lewinsky either swear to the facts that incriminate the president, irrespective of their truth, or face the possibility of prosecution. There is basis for the reasonable belief that Starr has a persecutorial rather than prosecutorial agenda that challenges his impartiality.

MICHAEL M. STOLZBERG, Pasadena