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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Repub Venality Open Thread: Concerning the Hypocrisy of Ken Starr, and His Protege ‘Justice’ Kavanaugh

Repub Venality Open Thread: Concerning the Hypocrisy of Ken Starr, and His Protege ‘Justice’ Kavanaugh

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Backstory — new book dropped earlier this week. As described by Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

If there is a less excusable human being walking upright than Ken Starr, head huntsman of the Great Penis Chase of 1998, then I’m hard pressed to think of who it is. Since his salacious moment in the national spotlight, Starr has presided over a disastrous sexual-misconduct scandal and alleged cover-up at Baylor University in Texas. He took a job as part of the former president*’s defense team during Impeachment I, an indication that he was less offended by extramarital foolery than he used to be. And now comes a book by Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, the journalist who blew open the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking empire and the sweetheart plea deal that helped enable it, in which Starr is featured as a legal engine behind said plea bargain…

Brown also writes that the legal team started a semi-lurid whispering campaign against Marie Villafana, the federal prosecutor in the Epstein case. One thing we know about Ken Starr: his gifts as a casual purveyor of drive-by pornography have not dimmed since the days he was reciting Bill Clinton’s what’s and wherefore’s before congressional committees…

Ms. Brown’s book also seems to have inspired Judi Hershman to publish a mini-memoir on Medium, where she asserts that Frat Kavanaugh was Starr’s protege, and known to be ‘feral’ around women. Hershman thought Starr might take her warning seriously, because he and she were longterm associates, and also had an affair in common…

You can read the whole sordid thing here.

Starr has now been duly underbus’d by the NeverTrumper GOP faction. Since he’s about to turn 75, and it will take some time for his Baylor notoriety to fade, I don’t think he’s in the running for another policy-making job. But there’s nothing I can find from the GOP concerning Kavanaugh’s manifest unfitness…

Reader Interactions

58Comments

  1. 1.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    The odious Lucianne Goldberg… I heartily concur, but it might make things a little awkward if he’s seated next to Jonah at the next NT banquet

  2. 2.

    Chetan Murthy

    Crikey.  Starr too.  You just know there’s shoes still waiting to drop, about Rapey-K.  Even more shoes, I mean.

  4. 4.

    Kent

    @Josie: Odious is the perfect word for all of them.

    But somehow it seems inadequate to the task.

    Odious fucking traitors, the whole lot of them.

  5. 5.

    NotMax

    Open thread?

    One thing which can be said, the lady’s got moxie.

    Tennessee’s former vaccine manager said she received a dog muzzle in the mail before she was fired.
    [snip]
    At the advice of others, she said reported the incident to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which confirmed to CNN it is investigating the dog muzzle package.

    Fiscus said she told her husband, “They obviously didn’t know me because they sent me a size three which is for beagles and I’m obviously a pit bull, which requires a size six.” Fiscus said she is keeping the muzzle as a souvenir. Source

  7. 7.

    The Moar You Know

    There have been plenty of people who ended up with a Supreme Court seat who shouldn’t have gotten one, but most of those, you could at least make an argument.   In my lifetime, Abe Fortas (sort of, I wasn’t to be born for another year) and of course Clarence Thomas.  I loathe Roberts but lord knows he was qualified.   Alito as well.  Gorsch.  Even Aunt Lydia.  You could make the argument.

    Not Kavanaugh. I’ll leave the rapey part out and you still can’t make the argument.  Debt ridden compulsive gambling obvious alcoholic when you get right down to it.  Never was qualified for a single post he’s ever held.  I don’t understand how a guy like him ended up anywhere, and that he managed to parley that string of mediocre performance into a Supreme Court seat is just beyond me.  You can say it’s white privilege, but it ain’t even that because there’s a fuckton of well-qualified lilywhites of the Nazi persuasion where, again, you could at least make the argument.   Not with him. He’s got all the legal acumen and social skills of Donald “but what if he’s a failure” Trump Junior and undoubtedly the same taste in drugs and whores, but aside from that being a natural choice for TFG to make, how did he get to where he is?   Does his family have Money?   Not with a capital letter, not that I know of.  I mean, they had enough to pay off his gambling debts, but it takes more than that to end up getting a real say in how Money and Power get things done in this country, and I just don’t see where this mediocrity had the pull to get to where he is.  I’ll die not understanding it.

  9. 9.

    Soprano2

    Of all of them, Linda Tripp was the most odious in my book. She pretended to be Monica’s friend just so she could throw her to those wolves. May she rot in hell forever.

  10. 10.

    Chetan Murthy

    Remember when Gingrinch [sic] had to resign?  And then his replacement Bob Livingston had to resign [b/c extramarital affair] ?  And then they got Denny Hastert in, b/c he’d be a clean pair of hands?  Crikey. Molesters, adulterers all.  And they had the *temerity* to go after Clinton for adultery.

  14. 14.

    Lyrebird

    @wenchacha: ​
     

    Don’t the goats deserve better?

    Just trying to find something funny to say… I am not surprised by these creeps but I am nauseated.

  15. 15.

    lollipopguild

    @Urza: SpecialK made himself useful to people plus I am sure he promised to vote the way certain people want him to.

  18. 18.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Since this is an open thread, what do you all think of Lovecraft Country getting the axe at HBO? I know a lot of people at r/Lovecraft on Reddit didn’t care for it. Apparently there really weren’t many actual Lovecraftian elements in it, such Elder Gods, etc. Also, they thought it was “too political”, but that’s just typical Reddit racism

  20. 20.

    Urza

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I was really hoping for a second season.  I wasn’t sure how they’d pull it off.  I’m not a huge Lovecraft fan myself though.  Wasn’t much room to make it not seem political the moment they had African Americans travelling in that time period.

  23. 23.

    Another Scott

    @The Moar You Know: Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were clerks for Kennedy at the same time, according to an old USAToday story. That story said that Kavanaugh put in lots of hours.

    Warning – Politico:

    […]

    Kennedy’s seat, meantime, seemed destined to go to Kavanaugh, thanks in part to the glowing review of Kennedy, whose son, Justin, knows Donald Trump Jr. through New York real estate circles, and whose other adult child has connections to Trump world via the president’s 2016 Silicon Valley adviser Peter Thiel, most recently when the Kennedy firm Disruptive Technology Advisers worked with Thiel’s Palantir Technologies. Both Kennedy sons have been guests at the White House, and Trump had nice things to say about Justin in comments to Kennedy caught on a hot mic last year.

    For a White House that had been taking the pulse of the court through the deep network of Kennedy law clerks, his retirement had long been on their wish list. And a year after Trump chose Gorsuch to serve with his mentor, he picked another ex-Kennedy aide to join him on the high court, a move that will shape how the president and the retired justice are remembered.

    Trump “is very transactional in a lot of ways — as long as it’s fairly immediate to the benefit for him,” a Republican close to the White House said. “The fact that Kennedy gave him that, he was flattered and thrilled by it.”

    “There’s a club, and you’re not in it.” – driftglass, and others.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  24. 24.

    Adam L Silverman

    @The Moar You Know: What is an associate justice of the Supreme Court who is completely compromised and beholden to his benefactors and patrons worth? Is it worth paying off his debts? Is it worth doing everything possible to ensure that the most scandalous details of his long history of being a black out drunk who us violent around and to women when both sober and drunk? Yes, yes it is.

  25. 25.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Another Scott: It goes beyond that. Kennedy’s father was one of the major mob lawyers in California. When Kennedy’s father retired, Kennedy inherited that practice. One of his sons went on to be the banker to money launderers at Duetsche Bank. Everyone around Trump is within one or two connections to the mob. Manafort’s dad in Connecticut: mobbed up. Giuliani’s family: mobbed up. KellyAnne Conway’s grandfather: mobbed up. Beginning to see the pattern?

  26. 26.

    Kent

    @Soprano2: Of all of them, Linda Tripp was the most odious in my book. She pretended to be Monica’s friend just so she could throw her to those wolves. May she rot in hell forever.

    She did die a painful death from pancreatic cancer. Unlike Kavanaugh and Starr. So there’s that.

  27. 27.

    Kent

    @rikyrah:

    Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) tweeted at 0:01 PM on Thu, Jul 15, 2021:
    If someone in the U.S. dies of #covid19, 99 times out of 100 they are unvaccinated.

    “Dying at this stage in the pandemic is almost like a soldier dying after a peace treaty has been signed. Heartbreaking and largely preventable.”

    So true @drsanjaygupta https://t.co/UujqRNNZNY
    (https://twitter.com/DrLeanaWen/status/1415718121885863940?s=03)

    Not a good analogy.  Solders who die at the end of a war do so because they were sent there.  Someone else made the decision.  So yes, heartbreaking deaths.

    MAGAts who die of Covid now are not dying tragic heartbreaking deaths.  They are dipshits playing Russian Roulette with a pitiless virus and putting the rest of us at risk.

  28. 28.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Why was the son of a mob lawyer ever fucking on the federal courts? Or teaching law at the University of the Pacific? I guess the official justification is that the sins of the father should not be held against the son? Oh wait, the fucker inherited the practice from his father and was in it for several years, nvm

  29. 29.

    Soprano2

    @Kent: Good, I hope she suffered. She used her hatred of the Clintons to justify a betrayal that almost destroyed a young woman’s life. She was a psychopath.

  30. 30.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kent:

    She did die a painful death from pancreatic cancer. Unlike Kavanaugh and Starr.

    I live in hope.

    Kavanaugh reminds me of Tim Russert, who apparently also liked beer, and beef, and by all accounts was a very genial guy off camera– protected Keith Olbermann during all those special comments when they were still controversial, and once told David Gregory that if he ever treated a server like that in his presence, they wouldn’t be in each other’s presence again. Unlike the rather volcanic justice Kavanaugh. Russert died at 58. I think Kavanaugh is around 55? As I said, I live in hope.

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Rehnquist started his career as the legal point person in Arizona for Operation Eagle Eye. A Republican voter suppression operation targeting Mexican Americans, and other Hispanic Americans, in Arizona. Kennedy once recounted that Rhenquist, who was in law school at the same university as Kennedy when Kennedy and his then girlfriend and future wife were in college, would march with several other students in khaki outfits, doing NAZI salutes in front of his future wife’s dorm. Because that’s where the majority of the Jewish women on campus lived.

  36. 36.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Good God, they’re all horrible people, aren’t they? Pretty sure Rhinquist and Kennedy were of an age in college that the Holocaust was well within living memory

  39. 39.

    The Moar You Know

    What is an associate justice of the Supreme Court who is completely compromised and beholden to his benefactors and patrons worth?

    @Adam L Silverman: A lot, of course.  And the mob thing you mention explains how he got in front of Trump.

    But you look at his CV and it is literally this:

    Clerk for Starr

    Clerk for Kennedy

    Three years working as a grunt in the W White House.

    Bush puts him directly from clerkship/coffee boy to Justice on the DC Circuit, that takes three years because he’s manifestly not qualified.

    Supreme Court

    What’s Bush’s motivation?   That’s really the inexplicable career jump, not the appointment to the Supreme Court, which makes sense in light of the connections you cite.

  40. 40.

    Adam L Silverman

    @The Moar You Know: Bush’s motivation would be directly tied to whomever Kavanaugh’s actual patron is. And that person is still unknown. It might be Leonard Leo, but I think it is more likely to be someone who funds Leo’s various dark money activities.

  41. 41.

    The Moar You Know

    What was wrong with Fortas?  I know the story; I am wondering what you think was the problem with him.

    @Omnes Omnibus:  Like I said, you could make the argument about him. He had a career and strengths.  I just feel it’s a poor idea (and so apparently did a lot of others) to put the President’s best buddy on a court that gets the final say over the actions of said president.

    But that was really before my time.  Fortas left when I was three years old.

  43. 43.

    The Moar You Know

    @The Moar You Know:  also disconcerting and almost unheard of in this day and age among people of Kavanaugh’s social class is his well-documented predilection to physical violence.  I’d like to know where that came from.  It has probably compromised him totally.

  44. 44.

    Anotherlurker

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I have not seen the HBO production but read the book and I loved it.  I also have read a great deal of Lovecraft.

    I see “Lovecraft Country” as a critique of H.P. Lovecraft, himself.  He was a notorious racist and I like the way the author used it as the real ancient, eldrich horror.

  45. 45.

    The Moar You Know

    I see “Lovecraft Country” as a critique of H.P. Lovecraft, himself.  He was a notorious racist and I like the way the author used it as the real ancient, eldrich horror.

    @Anotherlurker:  his racism, I feel, is grossly overhyped.   There’s a period in the 1920s – that lovely span of time when Wilson invited the Klan to the White House and they had the highest membership numbers they’ve ever had – where HP definitely throws a few pretty unforgivable sentences into a fair number of his stories.   Of course, he didn’t limit himself to bashing blacks, every ethnic group that wasn’t pure British got the treatment as well, including pure-white old fashioned American white trash.

    And then it stops.  Stone cold stops.  You won’t find racism in anything he wrote prior to 1920 (“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family”) and after “Herbert West, Reanimator” (1922). His treatment of minorities outside of that two year period is actually pretty respectful for the time.

    Which is good, because in 1931 he writes, back to back, two of the greatest sci-fi horror stories even penned by anyone; “At The Mountains of Madness” followed by “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.  It was his peak.  He died of stomach cancer less than ten years later at the age of 48, I think.

  47. 47.

    Kent

    @The Moar You Know:@The Moar You Know:  also disconcerting and almost unheard of in this day and age among people of Kavanaugh’s social class is his well-documented predilection to physical violence.  I’d like to know where that came from.  It has probably compromised him totally.

    You have clearly never been around entitled prep school shits.  The only thing unique about Kavanaugh is that he didn’t grow out of his drunken violent destructive stage.

  48. 48.

    Fair Economist

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Dropping Lovecraft Country seems odd and suspicious at first, but apparently the plan was for a reboot into a drastically alternate history with the US split into 4 countries. I can see why HBO wouldn’t want a second season that just threw the premise away. I don’t really see *why* they’d do the change as it seems like there was a lot of potential left with the original setup. The travel guide background provided an easy reason to have the characters encounter both supremacist and supernatural horrors all over the country – with inversions or re-inventions of the copious Cthulhu universe material. Plus of course a whole season where the original main villain comes back.

  49. 49.

    Anotherlurker

    @The Moar You Know: Wow! Thanks for bringing that to my attention!

    I am just starting to re-read Lovecraft and I will keep in mind the new perspective that you have pointed out.

    I would also like to say that I completely agree with you regarding “At The Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” . They really must be considered 2 of the greatest sci-fi/horror stories ever written.

    BTW, check out H.P.’s collaboration with Zealia Bishop: “The Mound”.   It is a lot of fun!

  50. 50.

    Fair Economist

    @The Moar You Know:

    And then it stops. Stone cold stops. You won’t find racism in anything he wrote prior to 1920 (“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family”) and after “Herbert West, Reanimator” (1922). His treatment of minorities outside of that two year period is actually pretty respectful for the time.

    Um, no. This article cites racist passages from “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925) and a *particularly* offensive poem from 1912. I remember quite a few problematic stories from a re-read of his stuff a few years back, but I Kondo’d the book so I can’t look them up.

  51. 51.

    Hob

    @The Moar You Know:

    You won’t find racism in anything [Lovecraft] wrote prior to 1920 (“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family”) and after “Herbert West, Reanimator” (1922)

    Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA oh wait you’re serious.

    That is a fucking ridiculous and ignorant comment. I don’t know if you simply have no idea what you’re talking about, or if you’re counting on no one here having read either his fiction or his correspondence, or if you have seriously creepy ideas of what something has to be to count as racism. But give me a fucking break.

    I have a deep love for horror-fantasy and I respect Lovecraft’s contributions to the literature. The man was a genius in some ways, even if those ways didn’t often include writing well. And for personal reasons I deeply sympathize with his struggles with mental illness. But he was a hateful paranoid basket case and an armchair Nazi. There’s no need to make ridiculous excuses for him that don’t stand up to a moment’s examination.

  52. 52.

    rikyrah

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I have never seen it. Will probably not ever see it. Saw the outline that the show runner wanted to do for Season two. White people could not have handled it.

     

    Same show runner who did Underground, which I still miss?

    Underground needs to be part of any school curriculum about slavery.

    They were just hitting their stride when it was cancelled

  56. 56.

    Feathers

    I don’t doubt that r/Lovecraft is a wretched hive of racism and villainy, but groups devoted to X have a tendency to hate adaptations which do any reimagining of the character or mythos. I loved Loki, but the fiery rage on Hiddleston fan boards and Tumblr is fascinating. The writing is bad. Marvel hates Loki. The show is homo/bi/trans-phobic. The romance on the show is disgusting. Sylvie is boring. Clinging to the fantasy that the show is unpopular. Hiddleston obviously doesn’t understand the character. Not everyone of course, but it has been known as a trash fandom for a while. There will always be parts of a fandom that rejects the new. Once that clique is of a certain size, they push out the other voices within a specific internet space.

    Haven’t seen Lovecraft Country, but plan to next time I have HBO. As to the cancellation, I’m not that surprised. With all the new streaming services, production facilities have been fully booked for a few years now. The pandemic meant that at least a year’s worth of productions didn’t happen and now have to fight for studio space where they can be filmed. Also, services kept buying new material during the shutdown, which means that a lot of good shows are just never going to be made, or get a new season. If the creative team on Lovecraft Country wanted to take things in a new direction, HBO may have decided to stick with having one beloved season. They’ve seen how a bad ending/season can kill the value of a once strong property.

  58. 58.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @The Moar You Know: the proto-gqp had to pay off the starr inquisition that bloodied the democrat party enough to make florida matter to what would have been gore’s victory.

    & ken starr was too old to be in the supremes.

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