With "Liberals' Dirty Shame," he gets in a twofer -- liberals are big fans of the porn and are enemies of free speech. Enemies, that is, unless the speech involves women of questionable morals displayed in all their bare-skinned glory.
In 1996, Miloš Forman directed The People vs. Larry Flynt, the propagandistic film that made a "First Amendment hero" out of the publisher of Hustler, a racist and filthy porn magazine. Frank Rich of the New York Times dubbed it "the most timely and patriotic movie of the year."
Even if you've never seen the movie (or read Hanna Rosin's contemporaneous debunking of it in The New Republic), it's easy to guess why the film was a favorite of people like Rich. It whitewashed Flynt while demonizing conservatives as religious prudes.
Considering that Jerry Falwell played a big part in Larry Flynt's life, it'd be hard not to portray Flynt's conservative rivals as religious prudes -- mostly because that's exactly what they were. And the typical right wing cognitive dissonance is on display here; liberals are perverted fans of filthy smut, until you need them to be radical feminists who believe "that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment." It's hard to believe that both groups would be the same people. But being a conservative columnist means never having to deal with accusations of consistency... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
