[His cadre of intellectuals] could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance atelier.

Frank Rich, who years and years ago condemned Epstein pal Larry Summers for his hedge fund activities while Harvard’s president, compiles a long list.

**********

On which, of course, the moral conscience of a nation and the late lamented president of the rapeabilliest and most Baptist campus in the country, appears.

… Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”

It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo.

Mike Lofgren’s column makes UD all nostalgic for the rapeabilliest campus in America, and its late lamented leader, Ken Starr!

One of Epstein’s lawyers was Ken Starr.

Yes, that Ken Starr, independent counsel of Bill Clinton-era fame, that half Eagle Scout, half Cotton Mather for whom, apparently, all sex was illicit.  Despite his ostentatious revulsion [against] the White House malefaction that he investigated with merciless thoroughness, he managed to be much more broad-minded defending pedophilia and sex trafficking charges when, in 2007, Epstein offered him a big payday.

Starr’s subsequent presidency of Baylor (the largest Baptist university campus in the world), from which he was fired for doing nothing about reports of campus rape later sustained in court, shows a similar moral relativism. It appears our high-level criminal class needs a sanctimonious front man or two to keep the Bible thumpers in line.

You MUST know by now that UD/SOS loves people who write like Charles P. Pierce. Pierce, in a brief Esquire piece, lets rip his pleasure at having discovered that the Very Reverend Kenneth Starr Esq., Baylor University’s highest-ranking academic officer (until that campus rape thing) is one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. One of the guys who helped Epstein – a notorious sex offender – get a singularly light sentence.

As a headline from another source puts it:

Moralist Ken Starr Explains His Help For Billionaire Pervert Jeffrey Epstein

Ecoute: Those of us who love the full and frank exposure of full and rank hypocrisy love this story. It was written for us…. Continues to be written, cuz the tale of the high-profile men (including one of this blog’s favorites, FGM defenderAlan Dershowitz) accused of sharing Epstein’s underage sex slaves is finally – after years of flaccidity – up and at ’em again on the front page.

Not to mention the tweets.

… their massively overcompensated, violent, nutso football coach – the Roseanne Barr of the Gridiron – blasts out a hoax tweet, is informed it’s a hoax, and tells everyone who told him it was a hoax to fuck themselves.

[A doctored video] has been circulating for about four years among extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists; [it] splices elements of a speech [President] Obama gave in Belgium in 2014. The words are edited to make it seem like Obama told a European audience that “Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.”

In fact, as the unedited video and transcript of the speech shows, Obama was saying the exact opposite, discussing two visions of power in the world and arguing that authoritarianism was a threat to the international order.

Actually, the version where Obama’s saying the opposite is also doctored. Here is the actual original, from a speech Baylor president Ken Starr gave at Baylor when the rape scandal broke under coach Art Briles:

American universities are too intellectual to win football games; athletic victory can only come when professors surrender their rights to mentally retarded football coaches.

But giving the stupidest person in the state the state’s highest salary is only Step One.

The winning coach must also be a moral cretin, happy to recruit so many bad actors that WSU football boasts more arrests than any other team (here’s a loving defense of the goofy adorable lads).

He must be embroiled in endless expensive lawsuits against his former university football employers so that his current employer is afraid to fire him (lawsuits and buyouts and bad publicity oh my!).

Did I say afraid? Unable.

… Leach’s newly signed five-year, $20 million [WSU] contract means they have no power to coach up their head man on anything and have no financial resources to buy him out if push came to shove — which it most certainly would if they tried to rein in The Prickly One. Moreover … this episode ensures that no other Power 5 school would consider hiring Leach away.

He must contribute to the school’s already appalling overall deficit by adding a $67 million athletics deficit.

He must, ideally, be the foreman at so demoralized a football factory that students must lecture professors, at the end of every semester, on their responsibility to give them final exams.

He must coach at a school that responds to massive sports scandals by appointing new presidents who can say huh? Dunno. Just got here.

And if you’re Leach’s Washington State, which happily scooped up the notoriously mad bad Leach cuz it doesn’t give a shit about anything except football (even sportswhore Texas Tech fired Leach after he tortured a player), you’re going to show your keen sense of irony by hiring a new leader whose main life accomplishment is this:

President [Kirk] Schulz chaired the NCAA board of governors, the NCAA’s highest-ranking committee, from 2014-2016. The board ensures that each division of the NCAA operates consistently within the basic purposes, fundamental policies, and general principles of the association.

When UD read that, she almost peed herself laughing.

***************

Commentary coming in, and as usual Deadspin’s got some of the best:

[The] irony of a guy whose entire career has been spent at the public trough JAQing off about government power is a thing of beauty.

This one has a country music song twang to it:

[H]e’s every aging white moron …

(Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be…)

**************

Sing it, Carly.

The concussed player you left in your office
The sound of you tormenting the kids
The look in your eyes like a nutcase
Your moronic conspiracy vid

Guess it’s our fault what you brought us
Our reputation’s dead on the floor
Why does your ghost still haunt me?
Cuz I can’t get rid of you no more

****************

Another Deadspin winner.

I think we can all agree that tweeting racist memes about our first black President is an excellent way to recruit black athletes.

… and today’s student sit-in at cash-machine-for-administrators Howard University shouts it out: At some point, a university becomes so squalid that its students have no choice but to take over running it from the knaves on the board of trustees. Just as seventeen year olds have to change America’s gun laws, nineteen year olds have to run Howard University.

Maya McCollum, a 19-year-old freshman who helped organize the sit-in, said on Friday that the news of [massively] misappropriated financial aid money was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

It’s all about the culture of the school, and making sure student culture matches administrative culture. Here, there’s a terrible mismatch. The Howard student culture has long been thoughtful, subversive, principled; the administrative culture has long been what’s in it for me. And so you generate the sort of conflict we see right now.

A shining example of a complete match between students and administration is self-righteous, rapeaholic, Baylor University. Baylor just gave a gift of fifteen million dollars to the football coach who oversaw, for years, large-scale rape on the school’s football team, and who recently filed a massive libel lawsuit against the school (he eventually dropped it – I guess when he got wind of the fact that Baylor was going to give him fifteen million dollars…). Do you hear a peep out of anyone – students, faculty – about their money having gone to someone who initiated a multimillion dollar lawsuit against their school? Who looked the other way (or worse) while his players raped and raped and raped?

Baylor still faces multiple expensive lawsuits from victims of its football players… I mean, think of all the university funds it’s losing in this long disgraceful spectacle. But do you see any student protest? Even a mild letter to the editor of the school newspaper? NO. Baylor’s full of good Christian rape-apologists. One for all and all for one.

*************

UD thanks Dirk.

If I may quote myself. I was listing the certified Grade A sexist hypocrites (Art Briles, Ken Starr, Buddy Jones) who made possible ongoing events at Baylor University, America’s current rapeabilliest campus. Now we need to add yet another layer to the cake: interim president David Garland.

A court filing this week reveals that the former interim president of Baylor University referred to some women who said they had been sexually assaulted as willing victims… [David] Garland also said in [an] email that he had heard a radio interview with an author who chronicled her alcoholism at college, the Waco Tribune-Herald reports. He wrote in the email that the interview “added another perspective for me of what is going on in the heads of some women who may seem willingly to make themselves victims.” … He then cited verses in the New Testament referring to God’s wrath on those who commit sexual sin.

Woe until thee Jezebels who seduceth our wide receivers into the very web of Satan! God will smite thee and all thy lawyers.

*****************

UD prefers the theology of Art Briles, who when told of multiple rape allegations by female students against multiple heavily recruited football players of his, said of one of the complainants: “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

The Lord brought those guys to Baylor. Who knows why? The ways of the Lord are strange. We knew they were bad dudes but they were a gift from God.

But ol’ Buddy ol’ pal — echt Wacoan, echt Baylor trustee, echt pious hypocrite (“[Ken] Starr … chronicled frustration with Jones in a recent book. Starr almost resigned in 2011 after Jones made a crude remark about the Baylor Alumni Association at a Baylor football game…”) — inexplicably restricted himself to calling female Baylor students who drank at a party (none, apparently, were underage) “perverted little tarts.”

Then-Baylor University Regent Neal “Buddy” Jones referred to female students he suspected of drinking alcohol as “perverted little tarts,” “very bad apples,” “insidious and inbred” and “the vilest and most despicable of girls” in 2009 emails to a faculty adviser, according to documents filed in a Title IX lawsuit against the university.

Ten alleged sexual assault victims suing Baylor attached the emails in a Friday legal filing to show a culture “using the alcohol policy as a pretext to shame, silence and threaten to expel a female student.”

Cunt and tart are both monosyllabic, and both end in T, but if you want to be president of the United States, not just a former Baylor trustee and current national laughingstock, you’re going to have to go all the way, like Mr. Trump.

****************

Buddy Jones – Bobby Lowder reincarnate – is Baylor. Know what I mean? You wanna know the deep structure, the god’s own truth, of a university, you take a good look at Buddy Jones, moral scold, sexist pig, and his state’s third-biggest water hog. Just like Ken Starr, he’s a walking talking religious hypocrisy doll; and boy do he sure hate women.

Buddy ain’t too bright when it comes to committing his thoughts to email. I mean, he knows enough to ask his correspondents to keep the emails private, but he doesn’t seem to understand the unlikelihood of this approach to privacy working.

In the 2009 correspondence, Jones also asked Davis to remove his name and comments from the email and wrote that his comments “are meant solely for you,” adding that at least one of the women should face expulsion.

Davis responded to Jones that day, saying the photos chronicling an engagement party did not include minors.

**************

So here comes all that correspondence for all of us to read – onaccounta oodles of never-ending Baylor rape trials and their evidence – and we get a good look at what we already knew: Southern sports factories are typically run by endless layers of assholes. The management structure of these schools is like that dim sum dish, thousand layer cake, only here it’s thousand layer assholes. Art Briles, Ken Starr, Buddy Jones – a whole royal asshole family ran Baylor, and now the place is trying to replace them with less assholery, but we’ve got a tradition here, people.

**************

For earlier posts on the asshole triumvirate, go here.

***************

NEW BAYLOR FIGHT SONG

(sing it with me)

Perverted Little Tarts!
Perverted Little Tarts!
Drunk and slutty through the years
Seducing with their arts!
They tempt our jocks and bring them low
Then claim that they were raped
Lord guide us as we courtward go
And pray that nothing got taped.

In 2011, Baylor University football star Tevin Elliott was suspended from school for academic misconduct, but was reinstated after university president Kenneth Starr intervened on his behalf.

… Elliott soon faced more serious problems. In 2014, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison after a trial in which four Baylor students testified that he sexually assaulted them. Three of those incidents took place after his reinstatement in August 2011.

Keeping people like Elliott in school “… was my moral view of what the president of the university does,” Starr said.

Kenneth Starr, president of America’s foremost Baptist university.

As for all those pesky gang rapes (Baylor has recently reached settlements with two of their victims), ‘“I personally have doubts that there were gang rapes,” he said.’

BAYLOR FOOTBALL SEEKS TO REDEFINE ITS IMAGE

It’s a terrific local propaganda piece, appearing days after one of Baylor’s football players was filmed viciously beating his dog. The player doesn’t make an appearance in the piece; instead, the football coach is quoted going on at length about

“We have a lot of really, really good kids… All I can speak to is since I’ve been at Baylor. We’ve lost some kids that were dealt with previously [this is the coach’s delicate allusion to rapists], but the kids I’ve been associated with are quality kids…”

Kids, kids, kids! UD loves it when coaches talk about their players as though they’re little boys… And they do it all the time. They’re the daddy; the kids are their boys… And there’s nothing like a boy and his dog to bring a tear to the eye, is there? Just one of coach’s adorable charges… Already 25,000 very angry people have signed petitions, a few days after the dog beating, calling for the coach to throw the lad off the team… but… you know… he’s a quality kid and just needs a little talking-to from Dad. Nothing wrong with him really except he, you know, likes to beat dogs. Not even worth mentioning in this local story about how in lots of other ways Baylor football – hell, Baylor University – would really like to redefine its image.

But what are you going to do? A disgraced president finally forced out; a huge and growing rape scandal; a football player starring in a home video all about his fondness for flogging animals… The stuff just keeps coming. Maybe Baylor should ask itself why.

… Baylor’s latest depraved scholarship student/hero football player to be dismissed from the team. (He should also be dismissed from the school.)

Baylor University, a Christian university with a repulsive moral history (type Baylor in my search engine if you dare), has no problem retaining this person as a student and as a football player.

Only unrelenting pressure from the civilized world can have any effect on the people running this sordid university. Such pressure managed to get rid of Ken Starr. It can manage to get rid of the dog abuser.

Ken Starr to Leave Baylor Law School Post

*****************

This latest news allows me to update Trump administration appointments/personnel:

Chief Advisor, Women’s Issues: KENNETH STARR
Inaugural Poet: FREDERICK SEIDEL
Treasury: MARTIN SHKRELI
Fitness Czar: RYAN LOCHTE
Czarina: HOPE SOLO
Office of Ethics: ISHMAEL ZAMORA
Health and Welfare: MIKE LEACH

Baylor grad, Waco mayor, she’s – to paraphrase Freud – our royal road to to the Waco political unconscious. Let’s do an Online Schoolmarm scathe of her recent opinion column in the Waco Trib.

She begins with lengthy throat clearing:

To my friends and fellow citizens: Baylor University regents, former Baylor President and Chancellor Ken Starr, Baylor first lady Alice Starr, Coach and Mrs. Art Briles, Ian McCaw, Interim President David Garland, Baylor administration, faculty and students, Waco Mayors Kyle Deaver, Malcolm Duncan Jr. and Jim Bush, City Manager Dale Fisseler, city staff, council members, chambers of commerce, Waco churches, schools, parents, Tribune-Herald, KWBU, KWTX, KCEN and other media outlets, Waco Business League, Providence Health, Baylor Scott & White Health Hillcrest, Family Health Center, McLennan Community College and Texas State Technical College leadership and students, Rapoport, Cooper and Waco foundations, Caritas and Mission Waco, to name only a few of Waco’s community: I write with you in mind:

It’s the rare op/ed writer self-important enough to speechify in this way before beginning her content (though we’re going to discover that this person has no content, so the throat-clearing makes sense). One envisions Harold Hill gathering the townspeople to tell them there’s trouble right here in River City. With the Baylor rapes and the breastaurant massacre, I think Waco already knows this.

The writer seems to share Hill’s confidence that when she pens a piece in the local rag everyone in town will be reading it.

(SOS finds “a few of Waco’s community” awkward. A few what?)

There is much that we don’t know or understand about Baylor University’s current situation. But we, informed or not, will grieve and face this time together.

Her second paragraph heralds the theme of her piece, if theme there be: Life is a Mystery. The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways. Ah Sweet Mystery of Life. Just no knowin’ sometimes. What’s the Use of Wonderin’.

And why grief? A lot of people round them parts are angry, which seems a more reasonable response to a piously religious school looking the other way when its students get raped.

Now there’s a long emotional paragraph reminding her fellow Wacoans of how they’ve laughed and cried together over the years.

Waco and Baylor have matured together. [Biker shootouts at breastaurants? The rape-friendliest school this side of the University of Montana? Maybe this counts as mature behavior in Texas.] We’ve cheered, won and lost together. We’ve prayed, sung, anguished over a horrific day in history, run races, raised funds, volunteered, built homes and voted. [Strange list, moving relentlessly from high crisis to charity work to the mundane.] We reared our children and relished in our grandchildren. [Reveled? I don’t think you relish in. You put relish in.] We stood by, helpless and mute, when the [Branch Davidian] Compound burned. We awkwardly welcomed world press and learned. We saw Baylor move from an accomplished but contentious presidency though a transition more difficult for Baylor than Waco, ultimately transitioned by beloved Interim President David Garland, then President Kenneth Winston Starr.

Sometimes bad writing is just about strangeness. Although nothing outrageously bad appears in this piece, there’s a general sense of weird vague wandering around whatever it is this person actually wants to say. Is her goal to cheer up demoralized Wacoans? Why should she want to do that? Given her self-importance, this comes across as patronizing, as if she’s designated herself Lady Sunshine… And why give us Ken Starr’s full name when no one uses that?

Having reviewed Waco’s many triumphs, the writer now says:

In recalling these victories, in no way do I condone systems that protect attackers and fail to protect women. Effective systems were and are imperative. Together we pray for all victims’ healing and strength to rebuild their lives. They’ll need friends and family, as well as effective medical and legal services.

Again patronizing. A short paragraph stuck at the end of the piece saying And girls now I just pray you’ll find closure… Make sure to get effective medical and legal services! And note that the piece has been personal to a fault throughout (actually naming her readers in that first paragraph) until it gets to the rape scandal, at which point it’s all about ‘systems.’

Here’s how she concludes:

• In absence of knowing, stand with Baylor in facing the future. It is and will always be Waco’s inextricably linked “Siamese twin.”

God grant us all wisdom, grace, mercy, courage and peace.

See what I mean about creepy? Not twin but Siamese twin, a phrase she puts in quotation marks, which leads SOS to believe that this is a well-known formulation ’round Waco. An unfortunate birth anomaly, one person unable to move without the other… Surgeons seem to think Siamese twins are worth going to great lengths to try to separate… This is the beautiful Waco/Baylor relationship.

And there’s the whole absence of knowing thing again, although we do know, which is why Baylor’s president, much of the athletics department, and much of the latest class of football recruits, has been fired or has fled.

Finally there’s the Great Amen, featuring another bizarre list — very long, with nice thoughts in it, and it could go on much much longer. Maybe it originally did. Maybe the Waco Trib’s editor deleted love, humility, tolerance, resolve…………

Rape, unreported, robs me of my rest:
Rape, silly rape, our ardent team encumbers:
Rape, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!

A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:

Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes

When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”

When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.

[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.

*******************

To jog your memory:

Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.

The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…

I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …

At Baylor University, things have certainly reached a pretty pass.

************

They’ve fallen down on the rape front at Rutgers athletics, but in every other way they’re maintaining the school’s distinction.

Since 2009, questionable behavior or oversight has prompted the resignations or firings of two men’s basketball coaches, a football coach and two athletic directors.

Last fall, several current and former football players were arrested and charged with armed robbery and other crimes.

… In 2013-14, the athletic department had a $36 million deficit that had to be subsidized by university discretionary funds and student fees. That was the highest subsidy among 230 schools surveyed by USA Today.

Hubba hubba!