He was, people will remember, originally hired in that decade to facilitate the so-called Whitewater Investigation of Bill and Hilary Clinton; but when he could find nothing wrong, he simply used one investigation to open another, going on countless such fishing expeditions until he became aware of Bill Clinton’s wandering eye. As a result of information he was able to leverage from a previous case, Judge Ken Starr eventually kidnapped Monica Lewinsky, held her against her will in a hotel room, and interrogated her until she confessed to consensual sexual acts with President Bill Clinton, including performing fellatio several times on the President in an area adjacent to the Oval Office.
Starr then collected every salacious detail he could find and then published them for the whole world to read in his 336-page Starr Report, the investigation costing the American public some $40 million. The Report included graphic descriptions of sexual acts, including the fact that once, while Monica was performing fellatio on the President, he slipped a cigar into her vaginal tract. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!” shrieked the newspaper cartoonists; reputable daily journalism waxed agog over the nature and disposition of the President’s penis. Starr’s fellow evangelicals in the Republican Party moaned and shook their heads in mock horror, all the while enjoying every salacious detail.
In so doing, Starr was engaging in a specifically American activity that has been around since at least the 17[SUP]
th[/SUP]-century Puritans held forth in Massachusetts: in a highly public and sometimes hysterical frenzy, a virtuous (and usually religious) authority figure denounces as the work of Satan some particular act or variety of sin—almost invariably sexual—lingering at length on the hideous details and the seductive nature of the sexual sins involved. (For a good modern example, see Rev. Jimmy Swaggart’s long, tearful, and occasionally slobbering public confession of his interactions with street prostitutes.) This alarming activity might be called ‘puritanical pornography,’ since the goal is so clearly to entertain and titillate the sexually repressed with details of sins uncounted, while at the same time enjoying the satisfaction of denouncing them. (Some effort is made to present the gratuitous recounting of sexual details as educational, but few are fooled by this.)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/20/ken-starrs-anti-semitism/