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It's those women, says Flynt, whom he's speaking to with his offer: "I'm giving them an upside to coming forward." Flynt has turned for expert help to veteran Washington writer and NPR contributor Rudy Maxa, who flew to Los Angeles last Friday to select the best stories and recruit reporters to pursue them. Maxa says he was lured out of semiscandal retirement by the prospect that some of those discarded on the ash heap of history might emerge to name names. Maxa's claim to fame is exposing former Congressman Wayne Hays and his "assistant" Elizabeth Ray ("I can't type...I can't even answer the phone"), and Paula Parkinson, who didn't play golf but teed up on an outing to Florida with top Republicans. Maxa says Flynt has created the ideal situation for loosening tongues: "money layered on top of revenge."
It takes someone a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty, as David Brock once put it, to assemble such a combustible mixture. Lionized in the acclaimed movie The People vs. Larry Flynt, the smut publisher came across as a crusader for principle (he went to jail to uphold the First Amendment) with a self-deprecating candor (he doesn't pretend that men buy his magazine to read the profiles). But Hustler's taste for barnyard animals and meat grinders in close proximity to unairbrushed women is so gross that Gloria Steinem and Jerry Falwell found themselves on the same side against him. Still, it takes a rich pornographer with nothing to lose to give vent to the dark impulse in the human heart to cook up sauce for the gander. He explains that he's one of the few people with the means to underwrite a witch hunt to match the one he says Ken Starr got the U.S. government to pay for. Starr, he says with mocking admiration, has "done what I could not do in a quarter-century: make pornography more widely available."
With the vote for an impeachment inquiry (or as Henry Hyde whimsically put it, "this venture, this excursion"), Flynt's effort is one more signal that things are spiraling out of control. As a sign on a Southern back road says, CHOOSE YOUR RUT CAREFULLY. YOU'RE GOING TO BE IN IT A LONG TIME. We've chosen the politics of scandal, and we may be here forever. "I don't see how you put it back in the box," says Republican Representative Christopher Shays. No one approves of a lying adulterer, and something grave must be done with the awful knowledge Starr forced on us. But impeachment? Flynt says he is just getting even for what Starr has done. Just as Republicans are getting even for Watergate and Bork and Clarence Thomas and Iran-contra. Just as Democrats one day will get even for this tear we are on. No doubt Flynt will snag some philanderers, and they will suffer shame if not loss of office, marriage and family. The drama on Capitol Hill looks more and more like a bad Italian opera, with singers in death throes everywhere. By the last act, the stars are still singing, but soon even they will be dead.