BLOODTHIRSTY BITCHES AND PIOUS PIMPS OF POWER

Celebrity lawyer and polemicist Spence (The Smoking Gun, 2003, etc.) ratchets up the rhetoric against conservatives in this latest entry in the Left-Right contest to see who can create the most outrageous title and fling the most incendiary accusations.

In his view, the “bloodthirsty bitches” are Nancy Grace, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham; the “pious pimps of power” are Bill O’Reilly, Pat Robertson and Sean Hannity. Another principal villain here is the corporation, called the “corporate King” throughout. Spence devotes the first half of his rant to character assassination, the second to comparisons between today’s America and yesterday’s Germany (you know: the Nazis). He wraps up with a proposal for reforming our political system by eliminating political parties, campaigns and elections, then programming a computer to randomly choose our representatives. (Yeah, that’ll happen.) Along the way, Spence offers a lengthy defense of trial lawyers—he prefers to call them “lawyers for the people”—and a detailed look at the oft-parodied hot-McDonald’s-coffee lawsuit. The specifics of that case, he shows, are indeed horrifying, but nothing like the misrepresentations promulgated by anti-lawyer types. He also assails what he calls “thingism,” the mindless materialism that often results in crushing debt for the average American family. Discussing this concept, Spence will not endear himself to feminists with such comments as, “Women [have] been lured out of the home by Madison Avenue.” (Is he suggesting that women work only because they want to buy more superfluous consumer products?) The author ends with a plea for Christian charity: Can’t we all just get along? Spence can be entertaining—hyperbole often is—and it is patent that the country is polarized. But he, too, eschews sober analysis in favor of ad hominem attacks and wild warnings about an imminent “Fourth Reich.”

A purely niche title, this one for the Lefty “Hate Culture.”