Hustling up Bush charges
Tuesday, February 17th, 2004
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Activist rocker Moby raised Republican hackles last week when he advised President Bush's enemies to engage in political mischief.
Moby told my fellow gossips Rush & Molloy: "For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion."
Now the incorrigible Larry Flynt says he plans to market a Bush abortion story as genuine - in a book to be published this summer by Kensington Press.
"This story has got to come out," the wheelchair-bound Hustler magazine honcho told the Daily News' Corky Siemaszko. "There's a lot of hypocrisy in the White House about this whole abortion issue."
Flynt claimed that Bush arranged for the procedure in the early '70s.
"I've talked to the woman's friends," Flynt said. "I've tracked down the doctor who did the abortion, I tracked down the Bush people who arranged for the abortion," Flynt said. "I got the story nailed."
Flynt wouldn't disclose whether he plans to name the woman.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie - who in a speech last week accused "Kerry campaign supporters," not just Moby, of hatching the Internet chat room scheme - was unavailable for comment on Flynt's charges.
But RNC spokesman Yier Shi told me: "The Democrats will do anything in this election, judging by their campaign tactics, to smear without any evidence or background. This is just another one of those cases."
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Writer can't put story to bed
Liberal pundit Joe Conason worked himself into quite a lather Friday over the rampant rumors concerning Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry.
"Is American politics suddenly returning to the bad old days, when Washington journalism became frenzied with sheet sniffing and keyhole peeping?" the Bill Clinton loyalist demanded indignantly on Salon.com.
Unfortunately for Conason, Internet commentator Mickey Kaus promptly discovered that, in 1992, Conason had engaged in just such "sheet sniffing and keyhole peeping" - a long, rumor-filled piece about Clinton's campaign opponent, the first President Bush, in Spy magazine.
"He Cheats on His Wife," blared the headline over the article, in which Conason enumerated various unsubstantiated personal scandals involving George H.W. Bush, including extramarital affairs and (as the Spy headline announced) "unpleasant details of Bush's all-around bachelor-party piggishness!"
But unlike cybergossip Matt Drudge - who, Conason charged in Salon, had "hyped to the maximum" the "vague and unsourced" Kerry rumors - Conason sometimes dropped the word "alleged" and published dirt as fact.
In a tone of supreme authority, he wrote about "Bush's adultery" and "the President's extramarital dalliances."
Yesterday, Conason explained: "That's the Spy style - it's a very assertive style. They just don't use a lot of 'alleged' ... But I stand by every word."
Conason also explained why, in his scorching of Drudge, he failed to mention his Spy piece: "I wasn't even thinking about it. It was 12 years ago."
In an E-mail, Conason argued that the subject of his Spy story was less Bush's supposed affairs than the media's reluctance to investigate them - in contrast to "nonstop press coverage of Clinton's alleged, rumored and gossiped infidelities ... Was the the President protected by a political double standard?"
Conason blamed Spy editors Kurt Andersen and Susan Morrison for the assertive headline.
"If you read the story, you'll see that the text isn't nearly as conclusive as
the cover line. I argued with Kurt and Susan that saying "He cheats on his wife' on the cover went too far, because I didn't agree that we had proved it. That decision was theirs."
Kaus retorted: "He blames his editors. But should he now be lecturing people on 'journalistic standards'? ... The lesson of 1992 wasn't that sex shouldn't be dredged up. It's that voters need to know everything. Democrats ignored Clinton's 'alleged, rumored and gossiped infidelities' and wound up electing a President who wasted most of his second term on a sex scandal."
The Briefing
Worry lines, be gone! It's premature to celebrate just yet, but defendant Martha Stewart is certainly entitled to a "Super Collagen" treatment after last week's favorable rulings in her securities fraud and obstruction of justice trial.
On Sunday, the domestic diva was spotted on the East Side plunking down $145 at the deluxe Mario Badescu spa for a facial featuring the special treatment that "gives the skin a radiant, healthy glow," according to spa literature. "Great before a special event."
An acquittal perhaps?
If that happens, Lowdown suggests that Stewart comp a spa day to Federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum - who on Friday denied prosecutors the right to call certain expert witnesses and introduce certain phone records.
Hire this actress or turn the page! Pity Chloe Sevigny, the indie-movie siren and Union Square mouse-lover.
She keeps losing roles to more mainstream actresses, even though she's been trying to go Hollywood.
"She recently left the William Morris Agency [for Endeavor] because they didn't cast the net wide enough (she fired them, not vice versa as was reported)," says Premiere magazine.
But Sevigny is still waiting for lightning to strike.
She recently had a good meeting with director Sam Raimi ("Spider-Man," "The Evil Dead" films) for a horror movie, "but then he offered the part to Sarah Michelle Gellar!" she laments.
"It's, like, 'What movie are you making if you have to choose between me and her?'"
There was another disappointment with "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" director Doug Liman.
"Liman basically said, 'Well, if we were going to go indie, we would hire Sarah Polley instead.'
"There's just a group of girls at the top who get offered everything, whereas I don't."
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