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What We Can Still Learn From Kenneth Starr

What We Can Still Learn From Kenneth Starr

For anyone who criticized the late Kenneth W. Starr in life, it might be prudent to observe the ancient Latin injunction: Say nothing but good of the dead. Or to step by in silence.

Yet the career of the former federal appellate jurist who served as Whitewater independent counsel and instigated the impeachment of President Bill Clinton merits rigorous attention, if only because his story illuminates so starkly the hostility of the religious right and the Republican Party toward American women.

No doubt Starr would protest that assessment and instead call attention, as he so often did, to his pietistic moralism. He always peppered his speech with phrases like “as we say in the New Testament,” and once sent forth a flack to inform Washington reporters that as he jogged along the Potomac River every morning, he sang Christian hymns.

That posturing went on full display during the Whitewater probe that he steered into a sex hunt. He was appointed by a panel of right-wing Republican judges after they forced out the moderate Republican Robert Fiske, who was about to end the fruitless investigation. From the beginning, Starr was tainted.

Whitewater was in fact a dry hole, because the Clintons had lost money on the ill-fated land deal and done nothing wrong. Having promised and failed to bring down both Bill and Hillary, he tried to resign– and then was forced by outraged conservatives to resume the hunt with his tail between his legs. It was not long before he started searching for a way to shape the prurient gossip about Bill Clinton into a criminal prosecution.

At that point, Monica Lewinsky fell into his clutches, thanks to Linda Tripp, a vindictive “friend” who also happened to be a conservative zealot, and Lucianne Goldberg, a scheming literary agent who had once spied on reporters for Nixon. Starr mercilessly exploited the young woman who had entered into an affair with the feckless president. Rather than accept a proffer that had been given to his own prosecutors, Starr tormented Monica (and her mother!) for months with threats of prison, unless she told the untrue story he wanted to hear, and wore a wire into Oval Office.

He concluded the investigation by humiliating both her and the president with the publication of The Starr Report, described aptly by critic Renata Adler as “a voluminous work of demented pornography.” By then Starr’s manic invasion of what many Americans regarded as private behavior had turned the public decisively against him. His inquisition crashed, along with his lifelong yearning for a seat on the Supreme Court.

In the ensuing episodes of his life, Starr confirmed all the suspicions about him aroused by the Lewinsky debacle. His professed concerns with morality and the protection of womanhood proved time and again to be a scrim for his worldly priorities of profit and power.

In 2007, Starr joined the defense team of Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy pedophile who had raped many underage girls and ultimately committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. He arranged for Epstein to obtain a sweetheart plea deal from US Attorney Alex Acosta, who had worked under him at Kirkland & Ellis, Starr’s longtime law firm. When exposed a decade later, this revolting scheme forced Acosta’s resignation from his Trump administration post as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Yet Starr’s “morality” easily accommodated this lucrative and depraved bit of lawyering.

Even so, a few years later Baylor University, a Baptist religious institution, named Starr as its president and chancellor. The university had reason to regret that choice soon enough, when Starr was revealed to have repeatedly concealed an epidemic of rapes at the school between 2012 and 2016. The Baylor regents bounced him from the presidency after an independent investigation of his conduct, and he subsequently quit his posts as chancellor and law professor in disgrace.

When Starr returned to the public stage as a lawyer for Donald Trump during his first impeachment, nobody could still pretend to be surprised by his hypocrisy. Untroubled by Trump’s history of boastful adulteries and serial abuse of women --including his first wife, who had accused him of marital rape -- or his hush payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, Starr liked to talk about how proudly he had voted in 2016 to prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency. Naturally, Trump eulogized him as “a great American patriot.”

How did Starr’s perverse style of conservatism, supposedly motivated by Biblical rectitude, inform his abuse of the heroic Lewinsky and his subsequent excusal of rapes and rapists? Apparently, he justified it all in the name of his godly mission. But now we have the whole sordid record of how he used virtue as a cover for vice. It is impossible to find in this reactionary figure even a trace of respect for female dignity and equality.

And now we know just how deeply embedded his pious misogyny is in the modern Republican Party that still admires Ken Starr.

More Than Once, Kavanaugh Failed A Character Test

More Than Once, Kavanaugh Failed A Character Test

Probably it’s not possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt whether or not Judge Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted then-fifteen year old Christine Blasey Ford at a high school house party back in 1982. However, that’s not the issue. Kavanaugh’s not being charged with a crime, but with being a creep.
Actually, there’s already ample evidence of that. But hold that thought. Nobody has a right to a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
 No less an authority than that great American (and Kavanaugh’s former boss) Kenneth Starr says “it’s too late for there to be any serious consideration at this stage.” But what’s the rush? Republicans thought it was just fine to leave a Supreme Court seat vacant throughout 2016 for purely partisan reasons. There’s no compelling reason for hurry now. 
Except that the longer this spectacle continues, the likelier it appears that Kavanaugh will be forced to withdraw. Gun-shy Republicans in close congressional races may insist upon it. Because, see, chances are the judge doesn’t actually know if he forced the young girl into a bedroom, tried to tear off her clothes, pinned her down and clapped his hand over her mouth to silence her screams, or if he didn’t.
That’s because there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that Judge Kavanaugh spent his years at Georgetown Prep getting hammered: knee-walking, toilet bowl-hugging, where-am-I-and-how-did-I-get-here blackout drunk. The other fellow Prof. Ford named as her attacker was his prep school pal, a conservative opinion writer named Mike Judge.
 Judge denies everything. “It’s just absolutely nuts,” he said. “I never saw Brett act that way.” However, Judge has also published two book length memoirs of his own struggles with drugs and alcohol. His book “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk,”features one “Bart O’Kavanaugh,”who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”
The pseudonym gives “thinly-disguised” a new meaning.
Also, in his high school yearbook, Kavanaugh himself claims membership in something called the “Beach Week Ralph Club” and the “Keg City Club.” (Ralphing, of course, being slang for projectile vomiting.) There are coarse sexual references too. At Yale, Kavanaugh belonged to a fraternity notorious for carousing. As recently as 2014, he gave a humorous speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society on the theme of “how drunk were you?” in law school.
Answer: falling-down. Literally. 
None of this is a crime either, but it definitely lends credibility to Prof. Ford’s memory of Judge and Kavanaugh’s intoxication that awful night. She says that she only got away because while Kavanaugh was holding her down and tearing at her bathing suit, Judge piled on, they all three tumbled to the floor and she managed to escape—locking herself in a bathroom until she heard Beavis and Butthead stumble away.
As I say, the nominee may honestly remember none of this. But does he recall getting blackout drunk? I doubt he wants to answer that question. What people sometimes don’t understand is that heavy drinkers can carry on carousing and making idiots of themselves for hours before passing out cold—often with no memory in the morning.
Hopefully, Kavanaugh grew up. But it’s his boozing the Senate needs to question him about as much as Prof. Ford’s allegation. There are high-functioning alcoholics everywhere.
Perhaps this is all terribly unfair to Kavanaugh. But it’s an important job he wants. Then too, as Heather Digby Parton comments, “[w]hen it comes to unfairness and character assassination, he’s an expert.” 
Few in Little Rock have forgotten his years-long harassment of Vince Foster’s family after the White House attorney’s suicide. At the behest of the incompetent Starr, who got his own investigative tips from Rush Limbaugh, Kavanaugh made their lives miserable.
Digby: “He spent three years and $2 million attempting to dig up dirt on the dead man, at one point demanding that Foster’s teenage daughter give the authorities specimens of her hair—an apparent attempt to prove or imply that a hair found on Foster’s jacket had belonged to Hillary Clinton.”
Failing at that, Kavanaugh next served as one of Starr’s chief leakers in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Bill Clinton’s sexual sins brought out the Torquemada in him. “It is our job,” he wrote colleagues in Starr’s office in an email, “to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear—piece by painful piece.”
Revolting, no less. Prominent among the questions he thought the President needed to be asked under oath and on camera was this: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?” 
Pervert or prig? You tell me.
Next Kavanaugh wrote the infamous Starr Report whose salaciousness shocked most Americans, helping Clinton get away with it and humiliating Monica Lewinsky, whom the prosecutors seemed to regard as collateral damage.
All perfectly in character, it seems to me.
Rehashing Clinton And Lewinsky — As If We Need To Do That Again

Rehashing Clinton And Lewinsky — As If We Need To Do That Again

Now that President Trump has brought us peace in our time, can we all get back to stoning Bill Clinton? Because no Christian doctrine is so universally ignored among the influential tribe of Pundit-Americans as Jesus’s admonition against sexual self-righteousness: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7)

Leading lives of spotless moral virtue, Washington journalists have long been of one mind about the Arkansas naughty boy. So everybody got a cheap thrill when Clinton responded peevishly to a series of barbed questions about Monica Lewinsky from the Today show’s Craig Melvin.

You know, Matt Lauer’s old show. The guy with the button on his desk keeping women locked inside his office.

Nobody at NBC knew a thing.

But there’s no statute of limitations where Clinton/Lewinsky are concerned. The former president’s one-time Oval Office squeeze definitely doesn’t think so. In yet another bid to keep her celebrity martyrdom alive, Lewinsky recently wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, again lamenting how the Big Creep done her wrong.

As indeed, he did.

But can nobody close to Monica persuade her that constantly picking at a 25 year-old wound can only prevent it from healing?

After decades of defiantly insisting that her relationship with Clinton was entirely consensual, indeed passionately desired, Lewinsky writes that her eyes have been opened by the #MeToo movement: “I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege.”

Look, there’s no point re-litigating all this at this late date. But if you google “presidential kneepads,” one of the first things that comes up is a Los Angeles Times interview with the former drama teacher with whom Lewinsky had a five-year affair before heading to the White House, intent upon seducing the president.

Yes, she was in her early twenties, a “near child” according to my friend, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist John Brummett. (In which case I married a near-child six months older than me, but never mind.) Monica’s White House adventures were very far from being her first rodeo, as we say out in the boondocks. Consent? She threw herself at him thong first.

Me, I couldn’t have gotten away fast enough. Drama queens put me off. That’s one reason I bought Clinton’s cover story for the longest time. That said, none of what eventually happened would have happened if Monica hadn’t betrayed him first. She violated Rule One of adulterous love affairs: She talked.

How could a man with even a fraction of Bill Clinton’s rumored experience not see that that coming? Lewinsky talked to damn near anybody who would listen, and particularly to her false friend Linda Tripp, who proceeded to destroy Monica’s life for political purposes.

Tripp and that great American Kenneth Starr, who may have failed to notice when the Baylor University football team went on a sexual assault binge, but who tried to pressure Lewinsky into saying Clinton urged her to obstruct justice. Courageously, she refused, possibly saving the Big Creep’s presidency after first helping him damn near destroy it.

But I digress. Back to last week. Appearing on Today to promote his book The President is Missing, co-written with best-selling novelist James Patterson, Clinton found himself asked no fewer than six times in a tightly-edited segment if he didn’t think he needed to apologize privately to Monica. Oddly, the segment aired with a 1998 clip of Clinton giving a shamefaced, lip-biting apology to pretty much everybody in the world, specifically including “Monica Lewinsky and her family.”

So it was hard to know what Melvin was driving at, apart from showcasing his ability to badger an ex-president. Anyway, just like that, the old gang got back together. A ritual stoning proceeded. Indignant scribes took turns lambasting Clinton for daring to imagine he could appear on national TV without groveling about his sexual sins.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Glenn Kessler, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, and, of course, the inimitable Maureen Dowd emerged as Monica Lewinsky’s champions. It was generally agreed that Clinton had paid no price for his misdeeds, and had a lot of nerve “raging” at NBC’s Melvin. Watch the clip. Do you see rage? I see mainly petulance.

Dowd hit Clinton with the ultimate insult: “Trump-level narcissism and selfishness.” Having spent decades comparing Lewinsky to the predatory Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction, mocking her weight, and lampooning her intelligence, the venerable Times columnist suddenly emerged as her champion.

Of course Clinton was foolish not to anticipate Melvin’s questions.

But should he pick up the phone, have a heart to heart with Lewinsky, and tell NBC about it?

I surely wouldn’t. Would you?

Guilt Feelings: Why Trump (Like Clinton) Will Require A Subpoena

Guilt Feelings: Why Trump (Like Clinton) Will Require A Subpoena

“Donald Trump insists he is willing — eager, even — to sit down for a tough interview with Robert Mueller. His lawyers have other ideas, and hope to strictly limit any questioning of the president under oath or prevent it from happening altogether. Whether they can pull this off is a legal and constitutional question for which the precedents do not look good.

“As they consider the options, they and and their boss would do well to learn from Bill Clinton, who was asked to testify on four separate occasions while under investigation during his presidency.

“On three of those occasions, Clinton and his lawyers readily agreed to the requests, without the issuance of a subpoena. It was only when independent counsel Kenneth Starr sought Clinton’s testimony again, more than three years later, that his defense attorneys strenuously objected. They managed to stall for almost six months before Starr finally sent over a subpoena, and the battle over that demand ended up before a federal judge in Washington in July 1998.

Why was Clinton initially so willing to testify, and then so hesitant?…”

My new post on Buzzfeed News looks back at the last presidential probe that led to impeachment — and what Clinton’s prosecution by the Office of Independent Counsel may mean for Trump. It includes excerpts from a previously sealed court hearing on the subpoena that the OIC issued to Clinton after his lawyers stalled his grand jury appearance in the Lewinsky case for six months.