According to “Bulworth,” all liberal politicians are bought by “big rich guys” in order to keep them from publicly identifying the real solution to society’s problems: Socialism! (This, of course, will earn particularly big guffaws in the newly liberated markets of eastern Europe.) Even more bizarrely, Bulworth-Beatty proposes Black Panther Huey Newton as oppressed America’s lost leader. According to the pop Marxism of the film, the “deindustrialization of urban America” has deprived minority communities of champions like Huey, who in real life was a coke-head, murderer and rapist. Huey’s message — as Eldridge Cleaver told a “60 Minutes” audience shortly before the latter’s death last month — was a summons to race war that would have created a “holocaust” in America, if enough people had heeded it.

Of course, the movie’s reform-minded posturing — with Bulworth attacking the media for being bought by the same rich guys who buy him — begs the larger real-life question: namely, how a right-wing corporate billionaire like Rupert Murdoch, owner of 20th Century Fox, could drop $30 million on a left-wing bomb-thrower like Beatty to promote such subversive claptrap.

Like a true Hollywood dilettante, Beatty, of course, has no actual experience on which to base his theories. When asked in TV interviews whether he has actually known any corrupt politicians, the aging matinee idol — who has been close to most significant liberal Democratic legislators over the last 30 years — responded he did not.

Bulworth belongs to the Oliver Stone school of political pontificating. But where Stone was slapped hard by liberal centrists who were among Stone’s targets, Beatty has been given a relatively free ride. So it is not surprising that the Marxoid message of “Bulworth” has been trumpeted as a newly rediscovered gospel: “It may be the most keenly astute and honest film about politics ever,” gushed a critic for a Los Angeles TV station. Others coyly endorse the movie’s supposed wisdom. According to New York magazine’s David Denby, Bulworth is a “thrillingly dangerous political comedy” and the senator is a “holy fool,” i.e., an idiot who tells the truth.

“Bulworth” would be a less significant barometer of the zeitgeist if it were not accompanied by another effusion of reactionary sentiment on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Since we are also approaching the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one might have expected the Manifesto, along with its bloody inspirations, to be consigned to a shelf of poisonous tracts alongside “Mein Kampf” and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Not so. Instead, two of the nation’s preeminent journalistic institutions, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, celebrated the commemorative edition, issued by the New Left Review as a tribute to Marx’s sociological “masterpiece.” If Marx’s Manifesto was shaky on a few details (the revolutionary fervor of the proletariat), it was still a prescient analysis for his time and ours, goes the thinking. The New York Times homage, written by (who else?) an English professor, suggested that the Manifesto could hardly be faulted as “a classic expression of the society it anatomized and whose doom it prematurely announced.” Prematurely, indeed.

For its own tribute, the Los Angeles Times actually reprinted the worshipful 3,000-word introduction to the new edition by historian Eric Hobsbawm, for 50 years one of Communism’s chief intellectual spear carriers. According to Hobsbawm, the Manifesto’s brilliance lies in its “recognition” that the future for 1998 America, as for 1848 England, is a choice between “socialism or barbarism.” Hobsbawm and Senator Bulworth clearly have a lot in common.

In a correspondence about the tribute to Marx, Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, himself a former Berkeley radical,
explained to me that “much of what [Marx] wrote about capitalism remains as penetrating as the day he penned his polemics.” To which I responded: “Like what for instance? The labor theory of value, the reserve army of the unemployed, the rejection of the market, the reduction of political and historical issues to issues of economic class, the prediction of increasing class polarization, the prediction of increasing misery, the prediction of a falling rate of profit, the prediction of capitalism’s collapse?”

There was no answer. Marxism is mythology. The failure of “progressive” intellectuals like Wasserman and Beatty to understand this, coupled with their enormous power in American culture, is one of the main drags on social progress today. Such “progressives” cling to a welfare system that has destroyed families in America’s inner cities. They have taken the core message of the Communist Manifesto — which is an incitement to civil war — and transformed it into a summons to gender and racial confrontation, a balkanizing of the nation, that makes any coming together to solve common problems impossible.

But the crowning irony of “Bulworth” is this: To the extent that the movie’s reactionary message gets through, it will make the more pragmatic liberalism of Clinton Democrats that much harder to effect, and the election of conservative majorities that much more inevitable.

Even the spokeswoman from Fox News, who provided me with the precise wording of the poll question, was tripped up by it. In fact, she expressed shock that they’d asked such a thing. “That doesn’t seem right,” she said, barely audibly, over the phone.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a media outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, he of tits-on-Page-3 fame, would come up with such a poll. But it also reflects the quaintly prurient coverage of the Lewinsky affair provided by the more “respectable” press corps, too. Thirty years after free love counterculturalists and bra-burning feminists supposedly liberated female sexuality from such archaic constraints, America’s aging, mostly male media hacks continue to fall back on the tired old virgin-or-whore model to explain it all.

Instead of settling down to the serious questions of Lewinsky’s sworn testimony and what influence the president might have had over it, reporters tut-tut about her tight blouses, come-hither looks and the apparent enthusiasm with which she discussed her sex life with friends and acquaintances. Once the thrill of saying “blow job” and “oral sex” in “serious” news reports wore off (thank you, Ted Koppel), the media lingered in earnest over the public confession of Andy Bleiler, the drama teacher who felt impelled to tell the world of his five-year affair with Lewinsky, coldly dismissing her as a “sex addict.” Also deemed newsworthy was ex-boyfriend Adam Dave’s confession that Lewinsky was known to favor handcuffs.

Big whoop. Amidst fevered talk of who Lewinsky bedded and how, only her lawyer, William Ginsburg, has suggested that Lewinsky’s sexual past is normal. I’d say, compared to most of my female friends her age, it’s rather bland. Among my contemporaries, it isn’t all that shocking to sleep with three different partners in a weekend, not all of the opposite sex. And for parents outraged at a 50-year-old man “taking advantage” of a girl not much older than his own daughter, then I’d say you don’t know very much about your own daughters.

Lewinsky and I are days apart in age. I attended her college graduation at Lewis and Clark, where a close friend of mine was graduating. Although I haven’t met Lewinsky, I’m familiar with the sexual mores of her age group, even of her fellow graduates. Let me clue you in to some shocking news from our generation: Sleeping with an older man, even a married one, is regarded as a triumphant rite of passage. My college friends berated me for passing up the “opportunity” to date a teacher 16 years my senior. For us, handcuffs were merely a milestone on the road to liberated sexuality, along with girl-girl experimentation and anal sex.

When I was 15, my friends and I passed around a well-worn copy of “The Sensuous Woman,” lingering over the explicit oral sex instructions. By 20, we were making lube runs together (showing a level of self-awareness our parents never seemed to reach). As for openly discussing sex, even with mere acquaintances? Lewinsky and I came of age in a decade when Liz Phair’s explicit lyrics — “Every time I see your face, I think of things unpure, unchaste/I want to fuck you like a dog, I’ll take you home and make you like it” — were blasting from dorm rooms across the country.

Sure, the White House and the Pentagon are hardly your local college pub, and Lewinsky would have been wise to have paid better attention to protocol and kept her wide lips sealed. But a naive lack of discretion hardly deserves the kind of roasting she’s getting. If she’s a “tramp,” as Fox News so indelicately put it, then find me a 24-year-old woman (or man) who isn’t, given the press’s puritanical and outdated standards.

More relevant to the scandal at hand is Lewinsky’s apparent obsession with the president and her generally flirtatious behavior, which the press has chewed away at with unwavering glee. I’m hardly an expert in the cult of White House interns, but from what I hear from friends in Washington, there’s a veritable fuck-fest taking place on Capitol Hill. And I suspect quite a few interns fantasize frequently about getting it on in the Oval Office, with the president or with each other. Lewinsky was hardly the first young woman to get mesmerized by proximity to power, and she won’t be the last.

The press also seems to have forgotten the polls a few years ago that showed that a large percentage of American women found President Clinton to be sexy and had fantasized about sleeping with him. Hell, I’ve even considered it. Seriously, if you’re given the chance to have sex, oral or otherwise, with the most powerful man in the world, someone who could obliterate a country with the press of a button, wouldn’t that produce some kind of rush? I mean, give the man a good orgasm and cancer-research funding might be increased due to the man’s suddenly sunny disposition.

But to entertain such ideas might dampen the shock value of the current “scandal.” As long as the press can convince us that Lewinsky is either a victimized Mia Farrow figure who didn’t know any better or a brazen hussy who tried to suck her way to the top, they can continue to hype the story. To present a more nuanced picture would be too complex. Handcuffs and “sex addiction” are ratings winners — Jerry Springer has proven that. So what we have is a bunch of prurient baby boomers punditing away as if their own sexual revolution never occurred. To them I say: Grow up.

Here’s what happened at the Spectator: Brock, and the magazine’s recently deposed publisher, Ronald Burr, both ran afoul of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded wing of the far right. Brock did it with his unexpected love letter to Hillary, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.” Burr fell from favor by apparently looking too closely into the moneys that the Spectator (which is headed by R. Emmett Tyrrell) receives from various Scaife foundations. A lot of this money was apparently disbursed to persons of less than stellar character — people, for example, who have been wandering around Arkansas looking for drug smugglers, murderers and hookers who say they can pin something on the president. Much of what they claim to have discovered has appeared in the Spectator — some of it under Brock’s byline, some under Tyrrell’s. Almost none of it seemed likely to survive a professional audit of the type that Burr was demanding, however, and so he is now out of a job.

Brock had already made a virtue of necessity by attempting to mainstream himself by dumping on his ex-comrades. So far, only Esquire has bitten. Tyrrell’s decision to cut Burr loose, however, has angered many on the magazine’s masthead, including P.J. O’Rourke, who told the Washington Post, “The tendency of the magazine to do this Clinton-obsessive stuff, I don’t get. It seems strange and somewhat embarrassing.” Coming from a Clinton-obsessive himself, those are strong words indeed.

In addition to bankrolling Tyrrell and company, Scaife, who once called Nation Senior Editor Karen Rothmyer a “Communist cunt,” is also the prime benefactor of such illustrious journalistic institutions as the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Accuracy in Media, the Heritage Foundation, GOPAC, the National Taxpayers Union, the Western Journalism Center and the collected works of one Christopher Ruddy. Just about the only Whitewater nut who is not sucking on the Scaife money-tit is The New York Observer’s Phillip Weiss. You can bet that each one of the journalists swimming in Scaife dough will stick to the Whitewater story, particularly given the cautionary tales told by the treatment of Brock and Burr.

The John (son of Norman) Podhoretz story, while considerably less dramatic, illustrates another truth about contemporary right-wing journalism. All of the writers who worship at the shrine of the free market would be lost if any of them were ever forced to earn their living working in it. The new editorial page editor has spent virtually his entire life supping at the table of strange right-winger foreigners seeking to buy their way into respectability by courting the American right. Podhoretz’s first patron was that distinguished theologian and jailbird Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who hired John and his college roommate, Todd Linberg, to provide a Nice-Jewish-Boy front for his nefarious activities. At both Insight and the Washington Times, young Podhoretz distinguished himself with prose that makes one yearn for the sparkling models of clarity and fine writing that appear under Abe Rosenthal’s name on the Times op-ed page. According to Charlotte Hays, who was also employed by the Moonies during Podhoretz’s tenure, John was known around the office as “John P. Normanson” because that was they way his editor introduced him to visitors. Writing in The New Republic, Hays reported that Podhoretz’s self-infatuated prose was often read aloud “to the accompaniment of gales of laughter.” Charlotte Allen even coined the term “podenfreude” to describe the enjoyable sensation one experiences while reading terrible writing.

Podhoretz briefly worked at U.S. News, which is owned by Mortimer Zuckerman, but is edited by real journalists. He published next to nothing and was summarily sent back to the Moonies, where he labored in continued obscurity before he was rescued by comrades in the Reagan/Bush speech writing office. This job turned into a kiss-and-tell memoir that garnered accolades so deep and moving that Podhoretz managed to land the prestigious perch of television critic for the New York Post. Rupert Murdoch, another foreigner anxious to use his media holdings as a way of ingratiating himself with right-wing political power, puts an estimated $10-to-15 million into the trashy tabloid in an attempt to tilt local political decision-making in his direction. In late 1994, Murdoch decided that he was insufficiently appreciated in Washington. So he tried to give Newt Gingrich more than $6 million for a book worth less than a fifth of that, and gave young Podhoretz and Republican power broker William Kristol another fistful of cash to found the Weekly Standard. (Kristol is the son of Neocon godfather Irving Kristol, who in turn is the chief beneficiary of the William E. Simon-directed largesse at the right-wing Olin Foundation. Podhoretz’s father is the former editor of Commentary and also the beneficiary of oodles of Murdoch money. Both Kristols are considerably more talented, to say nothing of feared/admired, than both Podhoretzes.)

While the Standard does serve as a kind of tribal drum for congressional Republicans, it has been no more popular with the larger political class than Gingrich’s awful money-losing book. The magazine’s circulation for the past six months barely topped 60,000, compared to 96,000 for the New Republic and just under 104,000 for the Nation. While the Weekly may serve its purpose by giving Kristol a larger forum for his sharp tactical political advice, it has failed in its central mission, namely to reshape the political discourse of the punditocracy. So Podhoretz is moving back to New York to take over the Post’s editorial pages, where he will try to fill the shoes of the infamous Eric Breindel, another Murdoch/Norman Podhoretz protigi.

If all of these connections sound a little confusing, they should. Contemporary right-wing journalism is a vast web of connections and feuds that, fortunately for the rest of us, keeps right-wingers primarily occupied with phony murders, internecine fights and lots of preaching to the converted. This may not be fundamentally different from the current state of contemporary left-wing journalism, but it certainly wastes a great deal more money.

Take the normally level-headedly liberal Guardian. “Defense scorns guilty verdict,” screamed its headline last Saturday, the day after Woodward had been sentenced to life in prison for the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen. The story was concerned less about the verdict and the sentence than with the options remaining for the defense and the competence of the jury. “Although [defense attorney Barry Scheck] did not actually confirm he thought the jury too stupid to understand the evidence …” began one sentence, in what might legally be termed “leading the reader.”

The Independent, another respectable liberal broadsheet, dropped the veneer of objectivity altogether. The victim’s statement, delivered by the parents of the dead infant, was described as “probably, to a British audience at least, cloyingly sentimental.” It went on, in phrasing more suited to a Victorian potboiler: The Eappens “spoke sentimentally about their loss, citing even Winnie the Pooh. But they said nothing about mercy for Louise, whose life as a free woman is vanishing.” The melodrama built to a climax with Woodward’s final statement, “before emotion choked off all further words and she slumped back to her chair.”

After five pages of coverage highlighting Woodward’s British courage and stoicism as opposed to American ineptitude and shallow sentimentality, the Independent’s “leader,” or editorial, argued that “it is neither British arrogance nor anti-American to say that there are aspects of the Massachusetts system which are inferior to the criminal justice system in the UK …” A legal expert on the BBC’s acclaimed current events program “Newsnight” expressed more bluntly what the entire country felt: Such things would never happen in a British court.

What “things”? Chiefly, the Hobson’s “loose-or-noose” choice of verdicts available to the jury, televised trials, the American media’s unrestrained coverage of the proceedings and mandatory sentencing. British critics also felt the trial was dominated by lawyers and judges who cared more about personal politics and careers than the case at hand.

The British may have a point about the “loose or noose” factor, which prevented the jury from considering a manslaughter verdict (even though that was the choice of Woodward and her defense team): In the U.K., juries can lessen the charges if they choose. But televised trials? Nobody complained when Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV picked up the Court TV live feed and broadcast it to the British public. As for criticisms of the permissiveness of American press coverage (a “media free-for-all,” sneered the Guardian), the British newspapers seem to have forgotten that they have been pressing the government for legislation similar to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (the British government’s control of “sensitive” information is more akin to that of a former Warsaw Pact country) and for a lessening of Britain’s severe libel laws, which have long hampered investigative and crime reporting. And many Britons have been screaming for mandatory sentences in the wake of appalling crimes such as the murder of Liverpool toddler Jamie Bolger by two young boys.

Of course, many of the issues raised are the emotional, in-the-moment kind. As a Sky commentator pointed out, were the parents British and the nanny American, a rather different set of concerns would doubtless have been expressed. Still, there is this lingering belief that the British system is less prone to such apparent outrages than the American, that quite simply, “It couldn’t happen here.”

Forgotten in this torrent of smug anti-Americanism are such recent cases as the Winchester Three, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, Annie Maguire, Judith Ward and the Bridgewater Four. Before their convictions were finally quashed, 19 innocent people, mostly accused of terrorism, spent years upon years in British prisons, convicted by a system that, it is now widely agreed, conspired to accept illegally obtained confessions and blighted evidence. And, by the way, the British justice system, unlike the American, does not guarantee the right to appeal a conviction.

In their rush to judgment about affairs across the Atlantic, the British have forgotten what can — and does — happen in their own backyard.

Joined on stage by the leaders of Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and the Seychelles, the U.P.’s first three “member affiliates,” Murdoch downplayed industry speculation that the fledgling organization lacked the critical mass to challenge the U.N. seriously. The first cause the new group would embrace, Murdoch announced, would be “exploring the good things land mines do.”

Nov. 16, 1997 (NEW YORK — AP): Ted Turner upped his stake in the United Nations, purchasing a controlling interest in the world body, but dismissed speculation that his more active role was motivated by rumors that the well-capitalized but under-propertied U.P. was plying key U.N. members with sweetheart deals. “World peace is bigger than any pissing contest between two men,” Turner told reporters. “And the Dodgers suck.”

Dec. 25, 1997 (NEW YORK — AP): Continuing to shock world-peace-industry naysayers, the News Corporation announced that 40 key U.N. members, including atomic powers China and Kazakhstan, would jump ship to affiliate with its U.P. division. The multibillion-dollar deal gives the U.P. a 40 percent market share of land mine and cholera victims. Asked whether he intended any symbolism by the choice of this day for the announcement, Murdoch appeared puzzled and replied: “Today? Today’s Rupert fucking Murdoch day, is what it is.” Pope John Paul II, attending the ceremony on behalf of new U.P. affiliate Vatican City, declined comment.

Dec. 29, 1997 (WASHINGTON — AP): Congressional Republicans today gave further credibility to the surging U.P. by pledging $1.5 billion to the organization, then passing a joint resolution vowing to pay that debt “only over Jesse Helms’ cold, dead body.” Philip Morris later issued a statement confirming that it plans to continue displaying the stuffed corpse of the late North Carolina senator in the 72-degree lobby of its headquarters. Capitol watchers agreed that this made further Congressional action unlikely.

Feb. 12, 1998 (QUEBEC — AP): In a move that analysts described as a bold reassertion of U.N./Time Warner vitality, blue-helmeted peacekeepers poured over the icy St. Lawrence River, putting down the separatist insurrection in this troubled province. Shares of Canadian U.N. shareholder Seagram’s staged a vigorous comeback, rising 5 7/8. Questioned about the puzzling emergence of the 200,000-man UN force from secret bases in the American southwest, Secretary-General Turner shook his head and pointed to his ears, indicating that the rotors of his black helicopter were drowning out reporters’ queries. In other news, lawyers for the U.P. filed a restraint-of-trade complaint, charging that Turner’s realization of a paranoid conspiracy scenario was an attempt to undercut the box office of the “X-Files” movie, scheduled for release this summer.

March 13, 1998 (LHASA — AP): U.P. peacekeeping troops swept over the Himalayas, overpowering rebel forces and declaring a 90-day “cooling-off period” in the Tibetan independence insurrection. In a grand gesture, Rupert Murdoch purchased the rights to the ballad “Candle in the Wind,” commissioning lyrics to honor the recently repatriated Dalai Lama, whose death in the explosion of a mammoth fuel-air device U.P. investigators ruled a suicide.

In other news, Chinese officials today agreed to a five-year extension of China’s contract with Sky TV. Murdoch denied that the Tibetan action was a show of force designed to convince the colonial government of Macao to grant Sky world broadcast rights to the Tyson-Holyfield rematch scheduled for next month.

March 25, 1998 (SOUTH CHINA SEA — AP): As reports of bright hovering objects and unexplained upper-stratosphere explosions continued to come in from around the world, Secretary-General Turner reiterated his charge that the U.P. was testing treaty-prohibited weapons for use in the U.N./U.P. Tyson-Holyfield standoff. Secretary-General Murdoch, still fuming after the dismissal of News Corporation’s “X-Files” suit, warned darkly that Warner Bros. was creating the disturbances as part of an all-out effort “to film a summer movie blockbuster so big it could plunge the world into nuclear winter.”

April 18, 1998 (NEW YORK, SOUTH CHINA SEA, AND SEATTLE — AP): As the broadcasting world continues to reel from the purchase of NBC by a heretofore-unknown organization identified only as “F.M.I.,” Turner and Murdoch, during their daily briefings on the land war in South Asia, each charged F.M.I. is a front for the other. Other industry analysts suggested the purchase would be revealed as a long-awaited move by Microsoft. In a press conference hastily called to address the rumors, Bill Gates began glowing white, shimmered briefly and disappeared.

April 20, 1998 (WASHINGTON — AP): President Bill Clinton made an emergency address tonight, imploring the two rival world-government organizations to “put aside their differences” and join the United States in responding to the repeated buzzing of commercial aircraft by brightly lit objects and the unexplained immolation of Redmond, Wash. U.N. and U.P. officials declined to respond. Clinton’s address, carried only by UPN, finished last behind “Timecop,” “Cybill,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Ally McBeal” and, in first place, three hours of pulsating light and oddly mesmerizing humming on NBC.

April 22, 1998 (MACAO — AP): Mike Tyson, explaining that he “had children to feed” and was frustrated over the loss of television-broadcast revenues resulting from HBO and Sky TV’s use of tactical nuclear weapons against each other, issued a tentative apology for biting Evander Holyfield’s children in last night’s melee. In other ne ALERT NIGHT DESKS BULLETIN SLUGIT CRAFT HOVERING OVE

April 24, 1998 (ORBITAL COMMAND UNIT Q^16 — AP): Greetings, fellow citizens of Earth! The GhzHeri peacekeeping force is completing mop-up operations after ending the bloody conflict on our planet. Turner and Murdoch, leaders of the cowardly terror campaign, were found guilty of treason against humanity and their traitorous bodies were rent asunder and eaten by Lord Turg’go, GhzHeri commander-general and CEO of Federated Media Intergalactic (see Business Briefs for coverage of F.M.I. acquisition of Earth communications concerns, including the AP). It is good and right that their amino acids will strengthen Lord Turg’go in the struggle to maintain Earth-peace! Hail, Lord Turg’go! In other news, all humans are advised to catch the season premiere of “Ktultul Place” on NBC! Will Brt’h find out that K*var is incubating HMOrrH’s larvae in her gestatory sac? It is good and right for all humans to watch NBC, consume snack products and grow fat and tasty! Communication ended!