Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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Fight them, without becoming them!

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

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“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

You are here: Home / Politics / IOKIYAR / Shameless Hypocrites Open Thread: Ken Starr, Straight from 1992

Shameless Hypocrites Open Thread: Ken Starr, Straight from 1992

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The very special prosecutor who chased rumors of Bill Clinton’s infidelities all over the national media has a major grievance. Per Liam Daniel Pierce at Vice Sports:

File this under: you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Former Baylor president Ken Starr seems to have forgotten what a real victim is, as, in an interview with the Texas Tribune [Saturday], he said that “a grave injustice” was done to Baylor’s fired football coach Art Briles. Injustice? Starr might be forgetting the sexual assault victims that received absolutely no justice under his and Briles’ tenure.

The Baylor University football team was rightfully embroiled in a scandal earlier this year, after an investigation revealed that the university and its football program repeatedly failed to respond to sexual assault accusations against Baylor’s football players. In at least one incident, the investigation discovered, university administrators even retaliated against a complainant. Starr was forced to resign and Briles was fired—and I guess that’s the injustice he was talking about?…

“I’m going to resist the issue, or the characterization, that there was an endemic problem,” Starr said…

Reader Interactions

137Comments

  5. 5.

    Jimm Mcdugal

    “Assholes” isn’t an appropriate tag for Ken Starr.
    You need a tag Flaming Assholes.

    Ken has been in the WACO bubble long enough that his judgement has been affected.

    Associating with people who publish things like this: EDITORIAL: Baylor inquiry into sexual assault might carry more weight if independent
    Posted: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 12:01 am

    Rushing to judgment and throwing a rope over a tree limb is an American vice. So it goes in condemning judge, jurors, police, coaches, administrators and news media in the wake of former Baylor University football player Sam Ukwuachu’s conviction last week for sexually assaulting a Baylor soccer player in autumn 2013.

    Strong feelings are understandable. Ukwuachu’s sentence of 10 years’ probation and 180 days in county jail can’t help but outrage all who crave justice for the shaken victim. This sentence has aggravated matters at Baylor at a time when more Americans question university priorities amid a nationwide plague of violence against women committed by football players.

    would probably ruin anyone’s reasoning skills.

    Additional background: Jesse Washington lyching May 15 1916.

  13. 13.

    Duke of Clay

    I’m just a bit older than Charlie Pierce, so I was an adult when the Clintons first burst on the national scene. All I can do is shake my head.

  14. 14.

    PIGL

    These sad tossers never got over the 60s. And we’re what, surprised that they still nourish in their bosoms the cheap tawdry triumphs of the early 90s?

    How did these pathetic, panty-sniffing, prurient losers end up forming the permanent government?

  15. 15.

    James E Powell

    @WaterGirl:

    Perhaps this news will give Clinton a lift? I certainly hope so.

    I could be wrong, but I get the impression that Hillary Clinton does not live in or follow the Idiot News as much as the NYT, WaPo, cable shows, and, sadly, the rest of us do.

  16. 16.

    hovercraft

    This is not surprising, republicans can only see injustice when it personally affects them. They have no empathy. They only favor gat rights when it becomes personal, and even then many of them still don’t, at least with those ones there’s consistency. As for Starr, fuck him, he ruined lives, and only belatedly has he begun to concede he went too far. Fuck him.

  18. 18.

    germy

    @PIGL:

    How did these pathetic, panty-sniffing, prurient losers end up forming the permanent government?

    Having a media empire on their side helped. Also the regular corporate media.

  19. 19.

    RaflW

    I pretty much hate everyone today. But by far I hate Republicans most. They are hell bent on twisting this country into something worse than it has ever been, and that is a freakin’ remarkable thing, considering the terrible crap* this country has perpetrated since it’s invasive founding.

    *We’ve done some good things, too. And I’ll come in off the ledge at some point but I think I can’t hang out in the political sphere today. Ugh, it’s just awful.

    ETA: This by NotMax however makes me at least a tad bit wryly happy.

  20. 20.

    WaterGirl

    @James E Powell: I would bet my house that Hillary Clinton and Bill are well aware of what is happening to Ken Starr and I hope that at least one of them has muttered “payback’s a bitch”.

  21. 21.

    Josie

    @Wag: It does take a long time – look how long it took to snare Starr, but I have no doubt it will catch up with the others eventually. Demographics will rule.

  22. 22.

    Ruckus

    @Wag:

    But why the fuck is it taking so long?

    It’s a big place. We are very small, tiny, little pieces of it. And it’s a fuck lot older than any of us, it’s been doing this a long time.

  23. 23.

    RaflW

    How did these pathetic, panty-sniffing, prurient losers end up forming the permanent government?

    Centuries of white male power dominance setting the terms of culture. That order may change, it’s being tested these days.

  24. 24.

    lollipopguild

    @hovercraft: They also have no memory of anything they might have done in the past=Convenent Memory Syndrome also known as Can’t Remember Shit.

  26. 26.

    hovercraft

    @PIGL:
    Hugh Hewitt has been all over msnbc today bleating about Ross Douchbags most recent column, ” Clinton’s Samantha Bee Problem”, calling it the most important column of this election cycle. The point of the column is that pop culture and the late night hosts in particular have veered too far to the hard left, and the American people have not, they resent the liberalization of society, gay marriage, marijuana, mullticulturalism, basically it throws every trope that republicans bitch about as the problems that are destroying America. These people all thought that Nixon’s Law and Order campaign and then the Reagan Revolution had cemented the country as a right of center nation. They thought they had beaten back the DFH and liberalism, and now they find that they won battles, but lost the war.

  28. 28.

    NorthLeft12

    Mr. Starr’s investigation and report was the defining moment of his life. Pretty well all of his fame and notoriety came from that overwrought exercise. Without his name on that report he would sink into the well deserved oblivion of any other Appeals judge or Solicitor General. The good news was that it gave him a later opportunity to embarrass himself even more in one of the more ironic twists of fate that anyone could imagine.
    But this stupid and bellicose fool could not keep his yap shut, so continue the embarrassment. I would have hoped that his wife would have intervened and told him to just shut his stupid gob, so maybe they could go out in public again in three or five years.
    NOTE: Not blaming the wife. For all i know she may have given him this exact advice.

  34. 34.

    MomSense

    @Mary G:

    That was a good one. It really is infuriating how much effort it takes to win our rights and then to defend them indefinitely.

  42. 42.

    chopper

    @hovercraft:

    the American people have not, they resent the liberalization of society, gay marriage, marijuana, mullticulturalism

    lol, I guess that’s why over 60% of Americans are down with gay marriage and almost 60 thing weed should be legal. cause we all resent that shit.

  43. 43.

    hellslittlestangel

    @redshirt: … things are getting better, every year.

    I can’t think of any truth that’s more difficult to be mindful of than this one.

  44. 44.

    p.a.

    any yahoo mail issues in android? ios seems to be ok to send/receive, can’t access on droid or log in to update/change pword. goddamnit

  46. 46.

    lollipopguild

    @raven: YES he was, but it made him interesting compared to all of the cookie-cutter Head Coach as CEO’s that are out there. I actually kind of liked him because he came across as a human being and not a Robot. I was at a company event when Coach Petrino spoke during our lunch-This was the first time Petrino was Louisville’s coach and he had all of the charm and warmth of a piece of wet cardboard. He did not want to be there and it showed.

  47. 47.

    burnspbesq

    @lollipopguild:

    You are supposed to win the SEC

    That says a lot about the football knowledge of the LSU fan base. LSU was about as likely to win the SEC as Duke was to win the ACC.

  48. 48.

    catclub

    1992 in the thread title

    .

    ON a technicality note. There was an investigation of Whitewater that found nothing, so the GOP got that guy replaced by hiring Starr to do it all over again, but with more animus. So I figure that was more like 1994. I could consult “The Hunting of the President”, but that is depressing.

  51. 51.

    lollipopguild

    @raven: Yes, I saw the score of the Ole Miss game. Do you think that your new Coach’s rear end is getting a little warm?

  53. 53.

    catclub

    @hellslittlestangel: It is almost always worthwhile to read Andrew Tobias. He is almost uniformly optimisitic about the future and all the good things that have happened recently.

    I was going to note that the NYT endorsed Hillary. That did not get much comment here, but is still important. In spite of all the NYT Hillary coverage crap.

  55. 55.

    lollipopguild

    @burnspbesq: But at Lsu you should be in the SEC championship game every year. Those are the expectations that come with that job. Chip Kelly at Notre Dame needs to start winning or he will join Les.

  62. 62.

    PIGL

    @RaflW: It was rather a rhetorical question. Of course, yours is a large part of the answer. Their private propaganda arm is another, as someone mentioned.

    I think that another part is the refusal or inability of the Democratic Party to fight fire appropriately. That is to say, with fire bombing, at the local, state and federal levels.

  64. 64.

    J R in WV

    The whole Ken Starr Investigation thing made me wild with anger. His writ wasn’t to dig into the Clinton’s private life until he found something. He had a specific assignment, a potential wrong doing to investigate, which proved to be nothing.

    But he had an unlimited budget, and his masters had a self-righteous arrogance rooted in total hypocrisy – they were all more guilty of sexual/bedroom dalliance than even Bill was.

    And Starr’s writ didn’t extend to two adults flirting in and around the Oval Office.

    Monsters, all of them.

  65. 65.

    hovercraft

    @catclub:
    Speaking of disgusting, another example of what a truly deplorable person looks like. When the media says that we’ve never seen anyone who lies with the frequency that Trump does, they are just showing that they live in their own beltway bubble. Anyone who has ever listened to the RWNJ’s on talk radio, is very familiar with this type of lying and the glibness with which it is spewed. They are just as fact free and contradictory as Trump is, and can go from saying one thing emphatically before the commercial, and come back saying the total opposite, like Donald they control who gets to ask them questions, so theur lies and contradictions go unchallenged.

  66. 66.

    burnspbesq

    @lollipopguild:

    An interesting sidelight on yesterday’s game: nearly every Duke person I know who was at the game has remarked on how gracious the ND fans were before, during, and after the game.

  68. 68.

    raven

    @burnspbesq: I had the same experience last weekend in Midway Sunday morning. They all knew Georgia was opening there next year and they were all complementary.

  69. 69.

    burnspbesq

    @raven:

    The consensus is that with Maryland thankfully gone, there are only two really ugly fan bases in the ACC: FSU and Syracuse.

  71. 71.

    hovercraft

    @catclub:
    Hugh Hewitt has a new brilliant analogy for what we’ll see tomorrow. Hillary is the brilliant AP teacher who is tough and studious, and spends all her time favoring the smartest students in her class, and writing recommendation letters, Donald Trump is the football coach who is abrasive and not PC, but produces winning teams, so everyone loves him. So I guess that makes this a choice between Hermione Granger and Bobby Knight. Bobby Knight is or was popular with Hoosiers, and some wanna be tough guys, outside of that, not so much. I think?

  73. 73.

    hovercraft

    @lollipopguild:
    This time they’ll come out, this time. Last time they stayed home because RMoney was too soft, this time they’ll come out because Trump tells it like it is. Silent majority!

  74. 74.

    lollipopguild

    @hovercraft: Not a bad analogy but people outside of Indiana hated knight in part because he was a Yuuge bully. Once Knight stopped winning enough he was gone.

  75. 75.

    PIGL

    Rescued from a dead or dying thread, for your repeated pleasure.
    —–
    “Public evil enters the house of each man, the gates of his courtyard cannot keep it out, it leaps over the high wall; let him flee to a corner of his bed chamber, it will certainly find him out.”

    The ancient Greek sage, Solon, quoted by John Ralston Saul.

    Evil is upon you. The corrupted Numenoreans are all but bringing victims to Sauron’s new temple….bringing them to be burned. And after November 2nd, they very well might.

  77. 77.

    ThresherK

    @raven: Is the NCAA ever going to get its act together on this?

    They got the call on that LSU non-snap correct.

    However (and I have no rooting interest) I’m tired of the human fallibility of one guy placing the ball and waving his arm and another guy starting the clock. Too much variance and you can have the exact same situation where in one game they rule the snap was in time, and another where it wasn’t.

    To me, either a team (when told where the ball will be spotted) is ready, or it isn’t.

    In the NBA you need x-10ths of a second for a tip-in off an inbounds pass, or y-10ths for a catch & shoot. I want the NCAA to do this.

  79. 79.

    lollipopguild

    @ThresherK: i agree with you but there is always going to be a human element to these games that you cannot control. Even replay Refs are human.

  80. 80.

    lollipopguild

    @hovercraft: His base loves him for exactly the reasons that the rest of us hate him. He and people like him see the life that we all share as a “game” He and his fans feel they will always win or at least be protected from the results. the rest of us understand that there will be bad results for us if he wins.

  81. 81.

    Redshift

    @Mary G:

    He was right. They will never stop, so we can’t either.

    Damn right. They’re still fighting about evolution, which hasn’t been a real issue since a couple of generations before the current crew were even born.

    Never let up. There’s no Superman, so it’s up to us to fight the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the (actual) American Way.

  83. 83.

    redshirt

    @PIGL:

    Evil is upon you. The corrupted Numenoreans are all but bringing victims to Sauron’s new temple….bringing them to be burned. And after November 2nd, they very well might.

    Love this reference so much! The black smoke rising in the sky over Numenor in honor of Sauron is an image that has stuck with me for decades,

    Any Tolkien fans who’ve not read The Simarillion need to remedy that ASAP. There’s a Sauron story that is just chilling.

  87. 87.

    Patricia Kayden

    @hovercraft:

    This is not surprising, republicans can only see injustice when it personally affects them.

    Yep. Explains their strong “I got mine, you sucker” attitude, which is perfectly epitomized by Trump.

    @quakerinabasement: Otherwise known as Karma is a b*tch.

  90. 90.

    Redshift

    @hovercraft:

    Donald Trump is the football coach who is abrasive and not PC, but produces winning teams, so everyone loves him.

    It says so much about modern conservatism that the Ambulatory Cream Cheese Sculpture believes that “everyone” loves abrasive bigoted football coaches. Everyone they know* is a rabid win-at-any-cost college football fan, so anyone who isn’t doesn’t exist.

    *Except for conservative “intellectuals,” who don’t actually associate with such people, but have been assured that they exist.

  91. 91.

    Redshift

    @redshirt: Yep. I firmly believes that the reason they can’t let go of it is that it was a hot issue when many of these denominations were founded. It’s written into their DNA, and it takes way more effort to abandon it than to just keep it going.

  92. 92.

    gene108

    @redshirt:

    Despite how insane everything seems, things are getting better, every year. We just need to keep fighting against the forces of hatred and ignorance.

    On a lot of social issues we have won.

    Ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is married to a white woman and lives in Virginia.

    That was illegal within both Thomas and his wife’s lifetimes, in the “good old days”.

    Edit: What I am trying to say is conservatives have given up and conceded on issues like interracial marriage. You can be in an interracial marriage and still be in good standing with conservatives.

  93. 93.

    MattF

    So, anyone who imagined that Starr has learned something or has changed in some way needs to reassess. It’s the same guy, the same wounded self-esteem, the same sexual anxiety, the same sense of moral priviledge. And those sluts? They got what was coming to them, FYI.

  97. 97.

    p.a.

    @redshirt: Also, Unfinished Tales has more Numenor, and The Hunt for the Ring chapter, lots on Sauron’ interactions w Nazgul, Gollum, and their mistakes allowing Frodo to leave the Shire. Tremendously frustrating chapter (too brief, basically an overview) on the 2nd Age & The War of Sauron and the Elves immediately after he forged the One Ring.

  99. 99.

    redshirt

    @Patricia Kayden: Silmarillion will never be a single movie or even a trilogy. There’s too much. It would be a fantastic HBO or STARZ show, but that too will probably never happen.

    I hold out hope for a single Beren and Luthien movie. That one story in the Sil has everything a movie needs.

  100. 100.

    p.a.

    @Doug R: yes, I’ve been changing pwords on bank/investment accounts. I have (3.5) 8×11 pages of assorted passwords- triple space (not all $; I’m not with Wells Fargo), fbook, tumblr etc. I’ll change them more at my leisure. Wanted the $ secured just in case. gorram modern world ?

  102. 102.

    lollipopguild

    @MattF: Bob Wills had an old tune called”Time Changes Everything”. Bob was right, electing a black man to be President-Twice! was a huge change from 40 years ago. For people like Ken Starr nothing can be allowed to change unless THEY approve,

  104. 104.

    James E Powell

    @J R in WV:

    His writ wasn’t to dig into the Clinton’s private life until he found something.

    That may not have been his formal duty, but that describes exactly why he was hired and exactly what Republicans wanted him to do.

  105. 105.

    Mary G

    Watching Vin Scully call his last Dodgers home game ever. Thanks to the greedy bastards who let KTLA broadcast these last games so us peons can say goodbye . He has been the background of my summers since 1958 or whenever they came west. Thanks Vin.

  106. 106.

    redshirt

    @p.a.: Yeah I don’t see how that would work as a movie. I’ve read many versions of the story, and it’s a great story, but like you say, completely depressing. If they made a movie of it, they’d change so much to make it a different story.

  107. 107.

    hovercraft

    @gene108:
    And not just any white woman, Ginny Thomas is an insane tea partier. Something that bugs the shit out of me, why the hell don’t the democrats make a big deal about this. Do you think if one of the liberal justices was married to the head of a Planned Parenthood superpac we’d ever hear the end of it? They’d impeach him or her.

  109. 109.

    Mobile

    @p.a.: Haven’t been able to access Yahoo mail on my android for a couple of days. Was able to change my password at the ATT/Yahoo full site.

  110. 110.

    PPCLI

    @hovercraft: Almost. In this analogy Trump is like the bully boasting football coach who actually doesn’t have any real successes to his credit, but his overbearing self-presentation manages to conjure the illusion that great success is just around the corner. [Alternatively: he did have one great success many years ago — really due to a fluke combination of great players and not his coaching — and he has been riding the wave ever since.] Trump is sort of the Rex Ryan or Charlie Weiss of politics.

  111. 111.

    catclub

    @redshirt:

    Silmarillion will never be a single movie or even a trilogy. There’s too much.

    certainly with peter jackson, who made three movies out of The Hobbit.

  115. 115.

    redshirt

    I can’t reply to you directly Patricia as you’ve somehow turned the reply button into a hyperlink, but I’ll believe it when I see it. If it was going to happen, now is the time.

  117. 117.

    Mnemosyne

    @lamh36:

    I know I said this the first time, but you guys are in SO MUCH TROUBLE now that she’s walking. Because with a baby that smart, she’s going to be climbing in the blink of an eye.

  120. 120.

    p.a.

    @Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. His family must be set to the n-th generation anyway. Chris Tolkien says no way, but he’s 92. Who knows about the next gen; those septuaginarians will do anything!

  125. 125.

    Fair Economist

    @Patricia Kayden: @catclub: Peter Jackson isn’t going to make any more Tolkien movies soon because the estate (Christopher Tolkien especially) hates, hates, HATES what he did with it – not just turning the travelogue of The Hobbit into a massive war story (which I expected) but too much action and too little attention to the source material for TLoTR itself (which rather surprised me, because I thought there were some great adaptations there.) Supposedly, part of the reason The Hobbit was bloated so much was the realization he wouldn’t have another go at the universe, so he wanted to put in some of the epic drama of the backstory.

    I think the Silmarillion per se isn’t good for a maxiseries – too much is abstract and cosmic, and the rest is more loosely connected vignettes. You could flesh out the Beleriand section into a long series (it does cover several hundred years, even in just that part.) The Tolkien estate wouldn’t permit it though, because you would have to add a lot. The primary copyrights expire in 2048, I think, so maybe in the 2050’s.

    (It would also be really depressing. Imagine watching Nirnaeth Arnoediad after years of watching great characters and stories – and knowing you had several years to go of everything good being destroyed.)

  126. 126.

    redshirt

    @Fair Economist: I feel like the entirety of the Sil is basically an answer to the religious question “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?”

    The answer is, in the big picture, everything ultimately reflects God’s plan, and antagonism produces higher beauty in the long run.

  129. 129.

    J R in WV

    @p.a.:

    We had a lot of trouble with Yahoo yesterday, Ubuntu 14.04 FF and Chromium, which worked better than FF. But our connection is idiosyncratic, with servers and long ethernet runs between out router and a sat dish next door, up on the ridge.

    We’re very rural/remote.

  133. 133.

    joel hanes

    Trump is no Sauron. He’s more like Grima Wormtongue.

    Trump and his voters are like the big bully kid in A Christmas Story (with the orange fur hat) and his miniature hanger-on (in the natty short jacket and snap-brim). These guys. The big one is an empty noise, used to getting what he wants through domination posturing, and the hanger-on is there to see weaker people humiliated in order to make himself feel powerful.

  135. 135.

    Eric U.

    this is in no way expressing sympathy to Starr, but I wouldn’t take a job as president of a university that has a football team. It’s incredibly corrupting, and the president is the one that takes the brunt of it. If the prez holds a star player accountable, that’s the end. I think they selected Eric Barron to the president job at Penn State because he seems to have covered up rapes by football players at his last job.

    On ESPN radio yesterday, they were talking about what it takes to have a dominant college football team. #1 was a rabid fanbase that will force the president to hire a good coach, i.e., waste big $ on it.

  136. 136.

    Zinsky

    I always figured Kenny Starr got a big stiffie researching Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he spanked the monkey while writing the eponymous Starr Report. The man is a degenerate – his grey, button-down wool suit, conservative exterior not withstanding…

  137. 137.

    Davebo

    @raven:

    There are worse things than getting paid 10 million not to work.

    Sad though as Louisiana’s state budget is still a cluster fuck.

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