Hypertensive garden gnome Mark Levin is uber-miffed that no one has (YET!)  had THE FUCKING BALLS to personally blame him for etching the names of twenty people onto bullets and then Fed-Exing them to Jared Loughner with a note that said “So it is written, so it shall be done. Go for it, crazy boy. Love, Mark”. But if someone does say that, ooooo mama, they are so going to get a legal cap popped in their ass.

Here, let Mark explain it to you between long gasps for air as he lays in his Iron Lung of Justice

Well. That took longer than it should have. During one of those pauses, Joyce Carol Oates wrote another novel

Do not fuck with Mark Levin. He is a Serious Fucking Lawyer. He even once wrote a serious fucking lawyer book about which light-hearted legal sprite Dahlia Lithwick once wrote:

Men in Black was published by Regnery Publishing—the outfit that brought us Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry last summer. Serious journalists spent serious time debunking the claims set forth in the Swift Boat book, but absolutely no one seems to be taking on Levin. This isn’t too surprising: For one thing, there’s no election on the line. And for another, no serious scholar of the court or the Constitution, on the ideological left or right, is going to waste their time engaging Levin’s arguments once they’ve read this book.

I use the word “book” with some hesitation: Certainly it possesses chapters and words and other book-like accoutrements. But Men in Black is 208 large-print pages of mostly block quotes (from court decisions or other legal thinkers) padded with a foreword by the eminent legal scholar Rush Limbaugh, and a blurry 10-page “Appendix” of internal memos to and from congressional Democrats—stolen during Memogate. The reason it may take you only slightly longer to read Men in Black than it took Levin to write it is that you’ll experience an overwhelming urge to shower between chapters.

The argument here is not new. In fact, one of the reasons it’s impossible to call Men in Black a work of legal scholarship is that there is not an original piece of analysis in it. Levin is railing against the Supreme Court for being a bunch of “activist judges” that “now sits in final judgment of essentially all policy issues, disregarding its constitutional limitations, the legitimate role of Congress and the President, and the broad authority conferred upon the states and the people.” So far so good. The country needs a smart, scholarly book anatomizing for lay readers the arguments against the high court’s ever-increasing involvement in political life.

But this is not that book. Men in Black never gets past the a.m.-radio bile to arrive at cogent analysis. Each of the first three chapters ends with the word “tyranny.” Absent any structure or argument, this book could just have been titled Legal Decisions I Really, Really Hate.

This is not to say that you should take Mark Levin lightly. Because he will “personally depose you” and you run the risk of nodding off during one of those interminable pauses between sentences and then you will wake up to find the trial is already over and Mark will have seized all of your assets and, those Beanie Babies that you’ve been hanging onto to pay for your retirement? Mark will own them and will be using them as toupees.

Then nobody wins, particularly the Beanie Babies.