The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy
By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor
Superannuated Republican dirty trickster and enabler of rapists Ken Starr died in obscurity last week at the age of 76. It's hard to improve on the summary provided in his Rolling Stone obituary:
We could stop there, but it may be useful to locate this antidemocratic creep where he belongs: in the wonderful mainstream of the Republican Party that never-Pres U Bum Republicans mourn. For Ken Starr would have been some obscure d**k partner at an insufferable law firm tying up the peanut butter rulemaking for 27 years without the enthusiastic participation of the entire Republican establishment, including, critically, that portion that puts on black robes and cosplays as judges.
We have to set the Waybac machine to the 1980's. Life was good under the smiling reign of St. Ronald of Bitburg. Between his cheerful attacks on “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” and his visits to the graves of Nazi war criminals, his popularity managed to persuade Republicans that they had a perpetual lock on the Presidency. It also provided high level government jobs and a later lifetime of ease to modestly qualified Republicans who could put up or agree with such nonsense and to insane whack jobs who were otherwise unemployable.
After Michael Dukakis fumbled the ball in 1988, allowing unlovable aristocrat George H.W. Bush to win, Republicans were sure that they were entitled to the Presidency in perpetuity. When the voters dared to otherwise decide, the Republicans were stunned, according to the New York Times:
(The Yankees went on to suck too, by the way.)
But the Republicans' “more philosophical” stance soon curdled into denial and rage. The party decided on the strategy it has since followed whenever a Democrat is President: total vicious opposition. Here's how one bright light of the Republican strategy described their position in 1994:
At 41, Mr. Kristol already has a long conservative pedigree, as the son of the commentator Irving Kristol and a former top aide to William Bennett, Secretary of Education, and Vice President Dan Quayle. But Mr. Kristol rose to new prominence over the last two years by writing a series of widely circulated memorandums that challenged the conventional wisdom on health.
...
Mr. Kristol played heretic, arguing against the idea that there was, in fact, a health care crisis; he also urged Republicans to resist any effort at making a grand compromise with the Democrats on the issue. "I never thought we faced an inevitably dominant resurgence of liberalism," he said, then and now. "I always thought '92 was a rejection of Bush, not an endorsement of activist government."
Hey, whatever happened to that guy? Hope he's happy about how things turned out, especially the hundreds of thousands who died between 1994 and 2014 because they could not afford health care, which to Billy was not a crisis.
The vicious Republican opposition to Clinton led directly to Ken Starr's reign of legal terror. Republicans trotted out all sorts of wild claims about the Clintons, but the one they pimped the hardest (with the dishonorable participation of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) was the Clintons' investment in a busto Arkansas land scheme known as “Whitewater.” No evidence of Clinton wrongdoing was ever found (or really even alleged), although a Special Prosecutor named Robert Fiske spent years pursuing the matter.
When Fiske, a highly-regarded ex-prosecutor and white-shoe lawyer, eventually concluded that there was nothing there, he was replaced by Starr:
Mr. Starr, 48, a conservative Republican in private law practice, is untested as a prosecutor. His background contrasts sharply with that of Mr. Fiske, a Wall Street lawyer, a former United States Attorney and a political moderate....
The White House was pleased with the initial results of Mr. Fiske's investigation, in which he found no basis for criminal prosecution arising from the discussions between the White House and Treasury that were the subject of the Whitewater hearings.
But under a broadly worded charter granted by the appeals court today, Mr. Starr has the authority, if he chooses, to go back over the ground covered by Mr. Fiske.
Under the old Special Prosecutor law, the choice of special prosecutor was vested in a panel of judges chosen by extreme reactionary Chief Justice William Rehnquist. So it was no surprise when the panel he chose, including a bag carrier for the notorious racist hell-raiser Jessie Helms, decided to keep appointing a Special Prosecutor until they found someone unscrupulous enough to carry out their desired political lynching.
Whereupon our dead guy spent the next four years chasing down one smear after another until he found that President Clinton had had a legal and consensual (albeit disgusting and inappropriate) affair with an intern. You know the rest of the sordid tale.
The point here is that Ken Starr was no slavering outlier in his dishonorable effort to bring down an elected Democratic President. He was acting with the full support of the wonderful moderate mainstream Republican Party that today cowers in a corner as their demented flag-bearer ever more openly pursues a fascist policy of democratic subversion by inciting mob violence.
After the impeachment trial ended and Starr's, um, service to his country ended, he parachuted into the kind of no-heavy-lifting high-paying sinecure usually made available to loyal Republican handmaidens; in his case, Presidency of a fourth-rate Baptist diploma mill in Tumbleweeds, Texas [Louise, please check – Ed.].
Which he proceeded to f**k up royally:
John Clune, a Colorado lawyer who specializes in cases of campus assault and who had already resolved three other women’s claims against Baylor, filed a lawsuit on behalf of an alleged victim that...claim[ed] that at least 52 rapes by at least 31 players had occurred from 2011 through 2014...
Baylor’s interim president has said in a statement that he cannot confirm Mr. Clune’s numbers, which followed other troubling figures that Baylor’s board gave to The Wall Street Journal in October: assaults on 17 women by 19 players, including four gang rapes....
 |
| Ken Starr loved a good sex scandal |
University officials have said in another court filing that Ms. Hernandez was Mr. Elliott’s fifth alleged assault victim at Baylor — her lawsuit said she was the sixth who had reported a sexual assault to Baylor — and that Mr. Briles was indeed apprised of her alleged assault. In addition, they said, only extraordinary interventions by Mr. Starr and Mr. Briles kept Mr. Elliott from suspension or worse because of academic misconduct....
Mr. Briles, the revered coach who had led Baylor to gridiron glory, was effectively fired. Mr. Starr, the affable president who reveled in that glory, was demoted; he later resigned.
Yeah, that's right, affable.
Somehow in the thousands of words conventional wisdom geyser Peter Baker spilled in his Starr obituary he didn't have room for any of these facts, reported in the March 9, 2017 editions of, wait for it, The New York Times.
You might think that an obituary of a man known for trumpeting claims of sexual misconduct to overthrow a President might have included a tidbit about how that same affable gent was unconcerned about much more serious charges of an epidemic of rape of women he was supposed to protect as the President of a Christian institution.
But then you might start to wonder why Baker didn't bother to mention Starr's earlier role as a mouthpiece (alongside prominent Jewish Democratic advocate Counselor Underpants) for degenerate child rapist and Presidential friend Jeffrey Epstein.
Starr's sordid post-Monica career and his ability to escape any serious accountability for his misdeeds only proves the point that he was not a rogue or an extremist; he was in the mainstream of the white Christian hypocrites who make up today's Republican Party.
Why anyone who remembers his career should be surprised every weeknight at 5 p.m. Eastern about today's gruesome subversive Republican machine led by a lying sex criminal is hard to understand.
Especially because those never-Pres Tiny Toadstool Republicans seem so, what's the word for it?
Ah, yes. Affable.
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