If you see it, Run far, far away!

First Saddam wrote a book (Zabiba and the King) and now Barbara Boxer has.

Luckily, John J. Miller of National Review has read it for you. He suffered so you wouldn't have to.

It is called A Time To Run.

Miller's review is called Boxer Shorts.

Here is some of what he had to say:

Have you ever watched a movie trailer that's amusing, but which also leaves you with the sense that you've just seen all the good parts? Think of what you're reading now as the same sort of thing, except that it covers the bad parts of A Time To Run, the new novel by Barbara Boxer, the liberal Democratic senator from California.

Of course, saying that A Time To Run has a few bad parts really doesn't give Boxer enough credit — the whole book is stupendously awful, from the first page to the last. As a service to you, dear reader, I have slogged my way through it, in order to share with you the worst of the worst.

You don't need to know much about the characters or the plot, except that the central figure is a liberal Democratic senator from California (sound familiar?) who must decide how she is going to respond to a Republican Supreme Court nomination. And thus, on the opening pages of A Time To Run, we encounter Boxer's utter lack of imagination:

It had been a particularly intense day in [Senator Ellen Fischer's] D.C. office, with a steady stream of meetings, e-mails, and phone calls from organizations and constituents, all urging her to step up her opposition to Professor Frida Hernandez's nomination to the Supreme Court. There was little time left for any attempt to block the confirmation of the ultra-conservative professor. ... Ellen, a member of the [Judiciary] committee, had sought to challenge the nominee's strongly suspected bias against Roe v. Wade. ... Ellen knew that, once on the Court, Hernandez would help turn back the clock on Court decisions that Ellen believed were vital to the people.

Ultra-conservative? Turn back the clock? Vital to the people? It sounds like a talking-points memo distributed by the DNC, a form of literature that is arguably a sub-genre of fiction. Alas, A Time To Run really is a novel, and before long Boxer describes not only her protagonist's liberal purity but also her good-hearted motives:

That was a defining moment, when Ellen knew how she'd spend the rest of her life — that she'd been put here on earth to save its endangered children.

You have to read the rest of the review. Scary!