Kenneth Starr
MA, Brown University
With a BA from George Washington University, an MA from Brown, and a JD from Duke, son-of-a-minister Ken Starr had a lot of schooling. After obtaining the law degree Starr did his share of lawyering, but from the start he had his eye on the public sector. He landed there in 1983, when Ronald Reagan appointed him a judge on the US Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. Then, in 1989, the first President Bush appointed Starr US solicitor general. After returning to private practice at a fancy DC law firm, Starr was hired by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1993 to examine the diaries of GOP senator Bob Packwood, who had been accused of sexual abuse by a boatload of women and foolishly took detailed notes* on his depredations. Starr’s notes on those notes led the committee to recommend that Packwood be ejected from the Senate; he resigned before he could be fired.*
In 1994, Starr, still in private practice, was tapped to work part time as independent counsel on the investigation of the Arkansas real estate deal known as Whitewater—which was big, since it involved, among many others, President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton. Although Starr was seen by both political parties as a moderate—too moderate for some of the more conservative Republicans—it appears that Whitewater unbalanced him. Maybe the desire to win eventually overcame the desire to be a decent human being: he morphed from milquetoast to attack dog.
Note that the Whitewater investigation was instigated and ginned up by a cabal of right-wing loonies funded by billionaire loon Richard Mellon Scaife. Although Starr wasn’t a charter member of the cabal, he ended up as an avid lubricator of their wettest dreams. In the course of the investigation, Starr prepared a document for the House of Representatives alleging that Bill Clinton had perjured himself and maybe ought to be impeached. The idea of impeaching Clinton, presented not by a certified wackjob but by the stolid-seeming Starr, had the Republicans salivating uncontrollably.
Sadly for them, Whitewater was already winding down. Fifteen Arkansans were convicted of various fraud and bribery charges, including Jim Guy Tucker, the state’s governor, who resigned. But no crimes were traced to the Clintons, and there were no grounds for impeachment. Before Starr could slink back to his high-paying law gig, however, something new came along: the death of Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel and former law colleague of Hillary Clinton. At which point Starr’s Whitewater investigation jumped the rails, and voilà—to violently switch metaphors—was reborn as Starr’s Vince Foster investigation. But despite the mouth-breathers’ claims that Hillary had personally murdered Foster and then covered it up, or something like that, Starr and everyone else who actually investigated the matter pronounced the death to have been what normal people had all along known it to be: a suicide.
Then the retooled Vince Foster investigation magically became the investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances with one Paula Jones and—after Starr’s personal request to the Department of Justice—Monica Lewinsky. Actually, all three (and more*) of these investigations overlapped; it’s just easier to describe the implacable, kaleidoscopic madness of the Scaife gang’s pursuit of the Clintons by laying them out sequentially.
This ferret-fuck continued until the release in 1998 of the material that became The Starr Report,* possibly the dullest sexually explicit book ever written. This led directly to a) the GOP getting their asses kicked in the November midterm elections, b) Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich resigning for overselling the Clinton scandals as a boon to GOP candidates, and c) Clinton’s impeachment* in December. The work of the nation was essentially placed on hold for the nearly two months of the blow jobs proceedings, which ended with the president being acquitted of the blow jobs charges and the nation wondering what the hell all that had been about.
What did Starr accomplish with his mad pursuit of the Clintons? Mainly this: in polls taken after the 2000 presidential election, the top reason George W. Bush voters gave for their choice was the candidate’s “moral character.” Which of course was relative, i.e., to Bill Clinton, which is not what the average GOP voter would necessarily have thought if Clinton’s morals hadn’t been publicly hammered every day for the previous six years. While the catastrophe of the Iraq war could not have been predicted prior to the election, the awfulness of a George W. presidency was entirely predictable, and was indeed predicted by many. Thanks, Kenneth Starr and the rest of the vast right-wing conspiracy.*
After the impeachment fiasco, Starr moved on to the things lawyers do after a high-profile government gig, viz. lucrative private practice and academic appointments. In 2010 Starr was named president of Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Texas. His initial project was to make sure the school remained a member of the Big 12 athletic conference. Alas, his concern for the well-being of the Baylor athletic program overshadowed his concern for the well-being of the Baylor women who were being raped by Baylor athletes. Which, apparently, is why Starr turned the other cheek to reports of sexual violence on campus. And why, in May 2016, he was fired as president.
Yes, Ken Starr—prissy scold, tool of hypocrites, and servant of posturing moralizers—flames out for his inaction and excuse-mongering in an actual sex scandal. Ain’t karma a bitch.