Pity the poor white man. He can’t catch a break in this country. The nation’s capital in particular is filled with persecuted Republican dudes crying woe. No less an authority on male victimization than Donald Trump Jr. complains that he fears for his young sons. In Washington, see, all it takes is a mouthy porn star, a talkative Playmate or an open microphone to ruin a man’s reputation.

But pay no mind to Don Jr., never the sharpest knife in the drawer.

According to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, it’s all the fault of that cunning she-devil Hillary Clinton. To hear Kavanaugh tell it – and under oath, no less – every bad thing said about him during his Senate confirmation hearings is rooted in “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

That there’s not a particle of evidence for Kavanaugh’s latest conspiracy theory shouldn’t surprise anybody. He and his former boss Kenneth Starr spent years pursuing Clintonian phantoms all over Arkansas and Washington in a futile quest for imaginary “Whitewater” crimes before Monica Lewinsky (and her betrayer Linda Tripp) helped them catch Bill Clinton with his pants down.

Kavanaugh wrote angry memos to Starr, demanding that the secret lovers confess every intimate encounter in humiliating detail. He then helped to author the “Starr Report,” whose smutty details shocked much of the nation but still unintentionally allowed Bill Clinton to get away with whatever he got away with.

“Demented pornography for puritans,” ABC’s Diane Sawyer called it.

So it’s only fitting that even as Kavanaugh struggled to win the Supreme Court seat that his mentor once believed was rightly his own, Starr should emerge from hiding to flog his new book, “Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation.”

Taken together, Kavanaugh’s tearful, bombastic accusations and Starr’s book render a quite precise portrait of who they are – and why dogmatic partisans like them have no business on the Supreme Court.

When last seen in public, Starr’s photos depicted him in a cheerleader outfit leading Baylor University’s football team onto the field. He looked absurd. Alas, the school’s trustees sacked then-President Starr in 2016 for his see-no-evil approach to jock dorm sexual assaults on the Texas school’s campus. He returned to Washington with his professional career in ruins.

Hence “Contempt,” a screed squarely in the Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh literary tradition, i.e. shameless, fact-free smears of Democrats, especially ones named Clinton. For example, Starr now tells us that he and his brilliant prosecutors (who managed to lose three of the four criminal cases they tried) seriously contemplated prosecuting Hillary Clinton for perjury.

Exactly as Starr’s team of assiduous leakers, Brett Kavanaugh prominent among them, kept telling reporters during the run-up to the 1996 presidential election. Back then, the vaunted “mainstream media” basically took dictation. Anybody like me who’d read Hillary’s actual Whitewater interrogatories had no qualms about predicting that she would not be charged. Indeed, the idea was quietly dropped soon after President Clinton’s re-election.

Still hiding behind grand jury secrecy, Starr now claims that Hillary was “a classic noncredible witness.” He calls her cold, aloof, smug and dismissive. In short, a bitch. Not a crime, Your Honor. Indeed, coming from a prissy specimen like Starr, it strikes me as practically an endorsement.

“In the space of three hours,” Starr writes, “she claimed, by our count, over a hundred times that she ‘did not recall’ or ‘did not remember.’ This suggested outright mendacity. To be sure, human memory is notoriously fallible, but her strained performance struck us as preposterous.”

Hardly anybody who watched Hillary Clinton’s 11 televised hours of Benghazi testimony in 2016 could find that allegation credible. Bitch or no bitch, Hillary knows the answers and gives no ground. She also never cried. That’s what guys like Starr and Kavanaugh hate most about her.

Having had the additional advantage of watching Starr’s inept prosecutors fail to convict Susan McDougal of obstructing justice back in 1999, I also suspect they’d asked Hillary a lot of nonsense questions. At McDougal’s trial, one line of questioning challenged her about a cashier’s check mysteriously marked “Clinton payment.”

She directed their attention to a real estate tract in Clinton, Arkansas (Van Buren County), having nothing to do with Whitewater. Starr’s Ivy League all-stars had dropped the ball. For nonsense like that, they’d exhibited McDougal around the country in chains.

As it related to the Clintons, Whitewater was never anything but a partisan conspiracy theory. Correct the errors and fill in the blanks, and the whole thing went up in smoke. They’ve been peddling this stuff for 25 years now without so much as a parking ticket conviction, but the Limbaugh/Coulter/Starr audience never wearies of The Bitch Chronicles. 

Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh was spending two futile years under Starr’s tutelage, plaguing the bereaved family of Vince Foster in a seeming attempt to implicate Hillary in the suicide of her dear friend and former law partner.

So no, I simply have no time for the crybaby’s tears.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.