To look at them, you’d think that TV women are as miserably oppressed by their professional status quo as any enclave of literate Afghan women living under the Taliban. As I was waiting at the velvet rope, I could see Michael J. Fox through the window in a rain of camera flash on some kind of podium, in a staggering dog-pile hug with many network Importantes.

The escalators were smotheringly packed into one big sweaty clog of suits, all, I learned later, craning for nearness to Heather Locklear. It became suddenly incredible to me that a huge conglomerate can decide that meaningless TV finger-puppets like Michael J. Fox and Heather Locklear are Important again, and suddenly, it’s not just pop culture, it’s actual CNN News. These recycled celebrities, the dregs clinging to the sides of the Fame Jar, can suddenly cause near riots with their deadly rays of commercially endorsed star-power again, after years of latency. Americans are easy corporate heathen, who, it is well-known, will practice wanton idolatry toward anyone Viacom tells them to, but it never fails to amaze me how indiscriminate they are.

It was during this reverie that the tiny pug-woman with the clipboard shrieked at me, “You didn’t RSVP! It’s not my problem that I don’t have you on the list! You can’t come in! I can’t talk to you anymore!” her tiny row of razor teeth bared, raw hatred foaming on her upper lip. I ran away without protest to have a whiskey with Maxfield Parrish’s Olde King Cole at the St. Regis. I didn’t have the will to engage, she was way crazier than I was; in a tussle she would go straight for the eyes or carve nail-skids on my face and neck with no thought of jail or future ruin — she was clearly deranged by high-viscosity, Hollywood death-lust.

It was yet another party where the A-list never comes in contact with the C-list; the real power heads were kept on a completely different floor, or in Brooks Brothers, a completely different department — a whole other, better, richer, more intense galaxy, with a bigger sun, closer to the light.

Speaking of idolatry, it must be that time of the decade again; time for yet another squalling, Jesse-Helmsish, delusional, egomaniacal rat-patroller to pound his chest and thump his dick on the table over yet another artist’s filth-stained religious icon in the art world.

The idiotically sensationalistic “Sensation” show scheduled to appear at the Brooklyn museum is at least now guaranteed to make one British artist an art star: Chris Ofili, the lucky guy who made the Virgin Mary collage with animal shit and pussy shots! He’s having steak and champagne in jolly old England every night this week! Roit-Ho! His will be the blockbuster piece of the millennium, now that Mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided to pull all funding from the museum to appease his own hubris-rotted cop-brain and the hanky-snuffles of the archdiocese.

Remember the “Piss Christ” Serrano controversy? Well, that was years ago. Serrano is famous now, and part of the accepted canon. “Piss Christ” is ironically appearing in the second half of the “American Century” show at the Whitney, and nobody cares, but this new waste-covered icon is perhaps so moving and terrifyingly effective in its desecration of Roman Catholicism that the shrieking, bat shit-encrusted aboriginal tribe-elder Giuliani feels it is reason enough to fuck up an entire museum, forever. Ofili is probably going to send Giuliani long-stem roses and a big box of novelty chocolate penises and gleefully mention this retread controversy in every single piece of press material he has, forever. His Virgin Mary, formerly just a quasi-shocking in an ’80s kind of way joke piece, will now sell for approximately 25 times what it was originally worth; he will now be the toast of the art world. He has “made it.”

The real tragedy about the Giuliani “Sensation” controversy is that now this mostly stupid show will have to be taken seriously — now we will have to decide that this hackneyed, adolescently shocking art-school mannequin wank is real “art” in order to preserve some semblance of the First Amendment. We’ll have to defend it with the blood of our right young men in order to disallow Der Giuliani from arbitrarily and vaingloriously dictating what images New York is allowed to see. Now all culturites and good bohemian lefties will have to chain themselves to David Bowie’s pet art show because Evil Stepdad wants to take it away; just like a tormented teenage daughter impulsively marries a loser boyfriend in a wet blur of mascara and harsh words.

The Clinton woman has got Giuliani politically afraid; now he’s retreating into histrionic Idi Amin gestures of absolute cannibalistic control. Soon he’ll pass a flag burning law; he’ll have Wayne Newton performing in riot gear at fist-shaking rallies in clouds of tear-gas; he’ll find and prosecute any tiny remaining cells of communism. There will be public Goth burnings in Washington Square park; police will break the thumbs of those who publicly spit or use the F-word. What Giuliani really seems to want is some kind of Emperor Tiberius-for-life status and is essentially catering to the very old, rich, God-and-nigger-fearing folk and putting New York under martial law until he gets it.

If I had a black son, I would chain him to the bathroom sink until this senate race blows over. Giuliani’s combination of hubris and paranoia is a classic cocktail recipe for terror in the streets. A friend of mine is a black guy from the projects in the Bronx who works construction full time. This is a good guy — an utterly reformed car thief who hasn’t seen the inside of a cell for years. The only problem with him is he’s very black and he wears gold jewelry and baggy clothes and he speaks with the accent and slang of a black person from the projects in the Bronx.

You wouldn’t think these were good reasons for removing all of his civil liberties, but the other day he was drinking a beer in a paper bag on his stoop and a couple of New York’s finest drove up and started yelling at him. He yelled back (it was, after all, his home), and they slammed him up against the car hood and took him to jail for three months on a wholly imaginary parole violation. It was a really shocking degree of harassment, but we were just happy the cops didn’t shoot him. One friend commented that NATO really needs to come in and mediate between Giuliani and the African-American people.

Last week, a lovely, well-spoken, white girlfriend of mine with a good corporate job and an MFA was smoking a joint on the street with some friends. This, believe it or not, used to be perfectly OK in New York; the cops had better things to do, they would “not see” you. Everyone knew the pot laws were cryptic fiscal nonsense and the legal layover of assorted zealous right-wing anxieties, and the cops would mostly leave you alone, unless you were really obnoxious about it. Anyway, my friend was caught smoking pot. She was handcuffed, taken to the Tombs, strip-searched twice and left in a cell with no food but two apples, no water and no phone call for 18 hours. Since it is not actually legal for cops to take you to jail and detain you over less than half a joint, the charges were dropped, but this is apparently a new routine NYPD tactic — you can’t prosecute the police for misconduct unless you want to open your own case back up, which in today’s ridiculously fundamentalist devil-purging atmosphere is tantamount to job suicide. It turns out that quite a few people in my extended social strata have had similar episodes.

It depresses me that the forces of Importance and Power in the world have utterly lost contact with any soul or resonance; the icon is worshipped above and instead of the Holy Idea, the tits are revered above and instead of the talent. I am so sick of America’s weird, puritanical hypocrisy and the hysteria it generates. I am so sick of the corpse-sucking human voles that use this hysteria to get seats in the Senate.

Come see my Giuliani campaign poster — it’s like one of those billowing totalitarian Mao banners, but it’s more like a Pietà, in that it is a bright, loving portrait of Rudy and his own mother, naked, and she is giving him what the shit-sex fetish underground refers to as a “Cleveland Steamer.” It’s art, baby. Real art.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

Once Republican voters made it apparent that they were uninterested in the Mayor of 9/11, you’d expect that Giuliani would, with some sense of relief, stop hiding that one shred of basic decency that made him palatable. And now gay marriage will soon be a reality in New York state! But, nope. The New York Post reports:

Ten years later, Koeppel is distressed that his former house guest hasn’t returned the many calls he began making before the legislation was passed last week.

By the way: Rudy Giuliani will address a women’s club luncheon in New Hampshire next month. The dream lives!

Dear Rudy Giuliani: You will never be president. Ever. You will never actually be elected to anything again in your life. No one likes you. Your job now is to just continue cashing in on the day you happened to be in charge of New York when something terrible happened, and that job does not require that you continue to act like a bigot. Just FYI!

Polls this early are, as York should know, total hogwash. It’s a contest based on name recognition, long before most voters have started to pay attention. That’s why Giuliani led the Republican field in national polls throughout 2007, with Fred Thompson in second. Both candidates crashed and burned dramatically in the early primaries and were gone before Super Tuesday. There were four main reasons Giuliani’s campaign failed last time, and none of them have been ameliorated since:

His political record is too socially liberal. This is a guy who started his mayoral campaign in 1989 running to Ed Koch’s left and compared himself to liberal lion Fiorello La Guardia (whom he called New York’s greatest mayor). Although he shifted right when David Dinkins got the Democrats’ mayoral nomination, Giuliani remained pro-choice and pro-gay rights: He even once bunked with a gay couple and famously dressed in drag. Giuliani endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor in 1994. He was a New York Republican, not the sort who can play in South Carolina. His stance on abortion — Giuliani gave up on his brief attempt to pretend he is anti-abortion rights when it was revealed that he had donated to Planned Parenthood, the GOP’s new ACORN — would be a major sticking point. Elite national Republicans like King and York don’t actually care about abortion — see the sections in “Game Change” on how McCain advisors had no objection to putting Joe Lieberman on his ticket — but actual Republicans do. That’s why McCain reluctantly concluded that he couldn’t choose Lieberman. A pro-choice Republican nominee would either trigger significant defections from the religious right to a third-party candidate or simply prompt many of those voters to stay home next November.

He wasn’t terribly popular or successful as mayor. National Republicans may not know this, and New York Republicans like Peter King may have conveniently forgotten, but Giuliani’s political career was over before Sept. 11, 2001. His abrasive manner and controversial policies had resulted in lousy approval ratings. He was trailing carpetbagger Hillary Clinton in the 2000 Senate race before he dropped out. His vulnerabilities have never been seriously exploited by an opponent, but don’t think Mitt Romney would hesitate to unload on him in a close race, especially now that we’re four years further past Giuliani’s post 9/11 beatification.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, Giuliani has nasty skeletons in his closet, even by the standards of a Republican politician. He has been twice divorced: His first wife was his second cousin, and he  dumped his second wife for his quirky mistress, Judith Nathan, at a press conference before informing his wife in person. During the last campaign Ben Smith of Politico reported that Giuliani improperly used police escorts to take Nathan to trysts in the Hamptons. To be fair, Giuliani’s pecadillos pale in comparison to those of Bernard Kerik, a Giuliani crony who started as his driver and was ultimately promoted to chief of the NYPD. When Giuliani recommended Kerik to be secretary of Homeland Security after the 2004 election, a bevy of embarrassing revelations ensued, from his affair with publish Judith Regan in apartments near ground zero that were paid for by taxpayers and intended for rescue workers, to accepting favors from contractors with alleged mafia links.

He also has no message. Giuliani events in New Hampshire in 2008 were depressing affairs. Small crowds, silently bored to death by Giuliani droning on about the importance of lowering the corporate income tax and the various taxes he cut as mayor. It seemed that Giuliani figured he had the national security hawk vote lined up and needed to focus on fiscal conservatives (since he surely could not count on social conservatives). But his only line that drew applause was a throwaway at the end when he would mention the need to “stay on offense” against Islamist terrorism.

But that brings us to the point that Giuliani’s one major selling point — that he happened to be mayor of New York on 9/11 — has been surpassed by events since the last election. President Obama just killed Osama bin Laden, so Giuliani can hardly claim that he would be more committed to taking out al-Qaida. The Iraq war, which Giuliani vociferously supported, is viewed by everyone who doesn’t work for Fox News as a failure. Even the war in Afghanistan is increasingly unpopular. Meanwhile, the news out of the Middle East is of the Arab Spring, which gives us hope that the region will accommodate itself to modernity and democracy rather than being a fount of anger and frustration looking for a target. Giuliani’s dour and militaristic view of Middle Eastern affairs seems especially out of step with the times.

Mostly, Americans are just worried about the economy, and Giuliani already proved last time that he can’t win the nomination with an economic policy focus. Giuliani is unlikely to run, and if he does, he is virtually certain not to win the nomination. The discussion of a Giuliani candidacy is evidence of nothing so much as the desperation of Republicans who want an alternative to their current uninspiring field. But they should take heart: Michele Bachmann might still run.

Among Regan’s many charges against her old employer was the claim that a top News Corp. executive told her to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Kerik, when he was (unbelievably) being vetted to head Bush’s Department of Homeland Security in 2004. (He dropped his bid when legal troubles came to light, and he’s currently in prison for tax fraud.) The exec told her to lie, Regan said, to protect Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a close friend of Roger Ailes. Fox-haters speculated the “high executive” was Ailes himself, given the fawning coverage the former New York mayor got from Fox, but Regan settled the lawsuit for a cool $10.7 million payment from News Corp., and the matter seemed to end there.

Today the New York Times reveals that it was in fact Ailes who told Regan to lie about Kerik – and the paper says Regan had tape recordings to prove it. Fox isn’t even bothering to deny it; where in 2007 a News Corp. spokeswoman told the paper “the company saw no merit in the filing,” Wednesday a spokeswoman said only that News Corp. had a letter from Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation,” adding, “The matter is closed.” (News Corp. officially retracted its claim that Regan was anti-Semitic as part of its settlement.) Regan’s lawyer insists News Corp. is misrepresenting Regan’s official statement, but he declined to say more.

He doesn’t need to say more: Affidavits reviewed by the Times show Regan’s former lawyers discussing “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.” The lawyer also said, “The Ailes matter became a focal point of our work” in preparing Regan’s case against her former employer. Key to Regan’s case was her claim she had been smeared with charges of anti-Semitism to preemptively discredit her in case she ever said anything about Kerik that could hurt Giuliani. “Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote.

You’ll recall that, in fact, back when Giuliani still seemed a viable presidential candidate, Kerik was a serious blemish on his record. Giuliani was regularly grilled not only about whether and when he knew about his former police commissioner’s many personal and legal troubles, but also about why he would recommend the man for a cabinet post. (The Bush administration was not amused.) Days before Regan dropped her legal bombshell, the Times revealed that Giuliani had in fact been briefed about Kerik’s ethics troubles by the city’s investigations commissioner before Giuliani appointed him to lead the police department in 2000.

After the Times story, the GOP candidate blithely told the Associated Press: “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime … What Bernie Kerik did wrong did not implicate what the results were for the public.”

Classic Giuliani: Arrogant and stubborn. Now we have classic Roger Ailes: using his media power to protect a Republican political friend. Giuliani officiated at Ailes’ last wedding, and helped when Fox couldn’t get a New York cable channel. The man who started out as an aide to Richard Nixon has never left behind his party politics, despite his claims of being “fair and balanced.” We’ll see if Fox reports on the Times story.

Fittingly, the whole mess came to light because Regan’s former lawyers are now suing Regan herself, claiming she fired them on the eve of her settlement with News Corp. to cut them out of their contingency fee. The affidavits the Times reviewed were mistakenly left public; they have since been removed from the public case file. What a tangled web.

Judith Regan was last seen on the Bravo television hit “Millionaire Matchmaker,” which sets up lonelyhearts moneybags with appropriate partners. (Her TV date went well; no affidavits have come to light revealing whether she found true love.)

Bernie Kerik was last seen on Twitter, railing against the so-called ground zero mosque — from prison. It all makes sense: Fox helped gin up the mosque non-story; Park51 is only blocks from the apartment for 9/11 rescuers that Kerik used as a love nest during his affair with Regan, which Ailes wanted Regan to lie about.

And Rudy Giuliani? His presidential bid imploded in 2008, he had to fold his consulting firm last year, but the New York Post claimed last month that he’s looking at a 2012 presidential bid. The Post is, of course, owned by News Corp.