May 16, 2001 10:26am
Porn King Flynt Seeks Dirt on President Bush
Source: Reuters
by: Crispian Balmer
(CANNES, France) -- Porn king Larry Flynt admitted Wednesday he was hunting for dirt on President Bush and struggling against a wall of silence in the president's home state of Texas.
Flynt, who publishes the hardcore sex magazine Hustler, fears the Bush administration will try to gag the pornography industry.
Flynt, a staunch Democrat and scathing critic of Bush, said he was looking to sniff out scandals from the president's past despite some stiff resistance.
``Bush has got a spin machine that looks like Mary Poppins. It is hard to get any information out of Texas. You get very little cooperation,'' he told a news conference in Cannes.
Flynt, who is paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair since a gunman tried to kill him in 1978, was a loud critic of the impeachmment of Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Perhaps predictably, the sun-tanned publisher launched a scathing attack on the new man in the White House.
``He is the dumbest president we have ever had,'' he said in a rasping drawl. ``He has his father's cronies to prop him up. ... Eventually he will crumble, things will go bad and we will be happy to have Clinton back,'' he said.
Renowned for pushing back the boundaries of public taste, Flynt warned U.S. politicians that they could not halt the sexual revolution, which is booming, especially over the Internet.
``There has never been more interest (in sex) than now. The genie is out of the bottle and with wireless technology, there is no putting it back in,'' he predicted.
Flynt appeared in the French Riviera resort against the backdrop of the Cannes film festival, which has become a magnet for porn stars seeking to steal the limelight.
But it has become a two-way trade, with some of the films at the hallowed festival displaying a morbid fascination in the adult industry and showing almost as much bare skin as you would expect to find in a porn movie.
``Without doubt (pornography) is becoming more mainstream,'' said Flynt, wearing a fist full of sparkling rings and sporting a neat crewcut hairstyle.
Flynt opened his press conference with an impassioned defense of individual liberties. ``The greatest right any nation can give its people is the right to be left alone,'' he said, accusing religious leaders in the United States of trying to impose their morals on everone else.
``The government is (doing) the same thing, feeling that if they can control our pleasures then they can control us,'' he said.
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