Grace’s hour-long legal affairs show currently airs three times each weeknight on CNN Headline News. This Monday’s show was
“Missing Children”, about a Florida co-ed who vanished 10 years ago, an aspiring actress who vanished 8 years ago, and a Latina Goth who vanished 4 years ago. The supposed children in question were all 18 or older at the time of their disappearance, not girls but young women actually. They are children only in the sense in which we all are, that they have parents.

Given that our highway system connects every city in the U.S. to every other city, is there some implication being made that the innocent girls of Miami are being killed by depraved New Yorkers speeding southward in rented cars? Doesn’t Grace know that less than half the city can even drive? Or does she mean to say they're being dumped there, where nobody would notice another dead body lying on the street?

Or perhaps she is suggesting the man's daughter ran away to the big city. By asking him to speak to her as if she were alive, Grace deftly milks the pathos for her big finish, in a way that is not only cruel but seriously counter-productive, since it is just such a possibility that delays police investigation until the trail has gone cold.

The perfect Missing Girl might have been a virgin and might have been a slut. No one knows. The answer to that question is what's missing.

Grace’s on-line bio tells us that in her previous career as an Atlanta prosecutor she had a “perfect record of nearly 100 felony convictions at trial and no losses.” In an adversarial system, the outcome of the case is not supposed to be a personal win or loss but a means of producing the truth. Besides, a hundred wins sounds a little suspicious to me. Did she pick her cases too carefully, in which case she might have let a guilty party get away to avoid breaking her streak? Or did she prosecute too zealously, and risk putting an innocent defendant behind bars? (For the record, she has since been officially reprimanded three times by appellate courts re-examining her convictions.)

At her site she rails against criminals making money from writing about their crimes — that’s her racket — and she boasts of one defendant she tried who got “life plus twenty plus twenty.” What are they planning to do, stand his corpse up in a cell for forty years?

Her bio also describes her as a “lover of Shakespearean literature,” by which I assume is meant the plays of Shakespeare. Does she love all of them or just the violent ones like Titus Andronicus? I can imagine her cheeks rouged with bloodlust at the end of Hamlet as the bodies pile up, but what if she were down in the front row for Romeo and Juliet? Don’t go for a jog alone, Juliet, I imagine her yelling, and make sure to check Romeo’s cell phone records every month once you're married!

Nancy Grace is the first sub-ideological demagogue I have encountered. She doesn't shout about terrorists going nuclear in the Middle East or Mexicans pouring over our borders. She keeps things relatable: white girls raped by blacks in the tropics, and wives killed by their no-good husbands.

The beauty part of the missing girls angle is that the story never ends; it's news that stays news ten years later. The girl is always still missing. Once you're missing, you're missing forever — unless you're found, and that’s even better. And if someone does finally get convicted, the story still doesn’t have to end, because you can follow them through the trial and imprisonment, checking in at intervals with the victim’s parents for doses of reliably gut-wrenching emotion.

Not only does tabloid television get high ratings, it’s cheap as hell to produce. Essentially you are taking old archive footage from local stations and splicing in a few routine interviews to make it new. Night after night you promise the latest developments in the case to an audience who have no other way of knowing that there haven’t been any developments.

What makes Nancy Grace in my estimation a new low, worse than what preceded her? First, that she is on CNN, which many of us remember was briefly a serious news channel. Second, that it is on in prime time and not daytime, meaning it is not just for housewives like Oprah is — the commercials seem to indicate a managerial audience. Third, and perhaps most importantly, that it is presented as legal analysis, when it is the exact opposite.

Her website also offers excerpts from her recent book. You may wish to read this excerpt in full yourself, because I don't think I will be able to adequately convey its aggrieved and paranoid tone.

As Grace tells it, she is under seemingly constant personal attack from defense attorneys, rival reporters, and relatives of the accused. You can see she believes in her persecution by the way she is constantly shadow-boxing past and potential future opponents; anticipating a criticism however is not the same as answering it.

She sees herself as a champion, a voice of the voiceless (who unfortunately can not say whether she really speaks for them, for example, in their assumed desire for vengeance). She has something of a martyr complex, and perhaps is thinking of Joan of Arc when in a failed extended metaphor, the law is likened to a sword she keeps both at the tip of her tongue and deep in her heart. I don't know which would hurt more!

She uses religious terms the way Bush does, speaking of God’s plan in a way that will be passed over lightly as common usage by some while being taken very seriously by others. Even though the terms — faith, miracle, prayer — are totally out in the open, they function almost like a secret code, since they have a completely different and non-metaphorical meaning for believers.

Conservatives are often depicted as cold and unfeeling, a gang of Nazi dentists in leather, but whenever I try to examine a reactionary closely, I always find they are bristling and full of hurt, like a bull who has been stuck with decoratively wrapped darts to put some fight in him.

In the realm of the ignorant, everything is bought and sold with the coin of suffering. To her audience it is the fact that Nancy Grace's fiancé was killed, not her having attended law school, that gives her the right to speak about legal issues.

I'm not a journalist, she says, I'm a survivor, a victims' advocate. But when read carefully, the passage reveals something surprising. The trauma Nancy Grace claims to have survived is not the death of a loved one, but rather the legal system itself.

Here is what Nancy Grace has to say about truth:

Read the passage again if you missed that she is saying she can’t pretend she doesn't know the truth, the exact opposite of what you expect any rational person to say. Her turn-offs include argument, conversation, anything two-sided it seems.

I am not a relativist but I get real scared when anyone comes into possession of a truth by any means other than patient observation and deduction, when it comes from within by spontaneous intuition rather than from careful assembly of accumulated facts, when Truth appears on the scene with its capital T burning brightly like a flaming cross in the front yard.

Let's look at an inspirational anecdote Nancy Grace gives in the same excerpt, as an analogy for how she feels about her legal career:

At the risk of seeming petty, I want to try to apply something like a legal standard of truth to this anecdote, to cross-examine it. What is the name of the woman, when did the event described take place, and how does Nancy Grace know about it? More importantly, how was the woman able to warm up for an hour and a half with hundreds of other women without seeing a sign or having a conversation about the length of the race? Why was she not told when she registered and paid her entry fee? How long, in fact, was the race? Was it an 8K, a 10K? Is it the case, then, that the woman expected to run for approximately half an hour or so, and instead ran for a little over an hour?

Much of the language is misleading and imposes unexamined conclusions on us. How long after recovering from breast cancer did she take up running? Did she run throughout the race or just at the final part? Did she raise her arms in victory because she had won, or rather because finishing was a personal triumph?

And what does any of this have to do with Nancy Grace, who chose to give up her legal career and instead become a TV personality? That’s more like running two kilometers and then opening a hot dog stand.

Here is what Nancy Grace has to say about the presumption of innocence (with numbers added by me to try to trace the steps in her logic):

So: I don’t believe in the “presumption of innocence”; no, I do believe in it, until there is sufficient evidence of guilt. This is essentially just handing the textbook definition back to us as if she invented it herself on the spot, and as if it somehow proved her point, which it doesn’t.

The poet Ezra Pound makes a similar rhetorical move in his 1933 celebration of Italian fascism, while discussing freedom of the press. In Chapter IX, he writes:

This move as I see it has three steps: blustering negation, empty pseudo-qualification, and then attempted recuperation. It starts with irritable grandstanding and ends in a bogus redefinition of terms. It uses near-simultaneous contradictions set in rapid sequence to create a logical train wreck aimed at paralyzing reasonable opposition. For Pound, it goes like this: The liberal idea of “freedom of the press” is false because I can't get my manuscript published; real freedom of the press means the press can be punished for what they say by the government I support.

This kind of underhanded move would almost suggest that fascism is an aberration that doesn’t really have principles of its own to offer, or doesn’t really believe in its own principles. Instead it must define itself by rejecting, rewriting and then trying to reclaim the universal principles of liberalism.

Pound says Mussolini is "right in putting the first emphasis on having a government strong enough to get... justice (p. 45).” Nancy Grace says, “The most important thing to me, regardless of the circumstances, was getting justice for the victim.” They both want first and foremost to get justice, though they are not themselves the wronged parties.

But getting justice is not the proper role for a prosecutor. The purpose of a criminal trial is to establish what happened. It is not a battle between a single person who mystically possesses the truth in advance, carrying it tucked under one arm like a football, and a massive system bent only on stopping them from reaching the end-zone of final vicarious vengeance.

In a murder trial, there can be no real justice. You can’t get back what was taken away, not by frying the most likely suspect or by stuffing them into a cold stone box to rot away the rest of their life.

When I was young, sympathy for victims was seen as the congenital weakness of the liberals, who were invariably called bleeding hearts. Today it is the conservatives who worship a cult of martyrdom validated by varying degrees of pain, revelling in stripes you earn by lashing yourself. So these days a TV personality denies being a journalist and dissociates herself from truth-twisting attorneys, and instead derives her authority by painting herself a victim speaking for other victims.

Glorified suffering is the bedrock foundation of popular conservativism. The real objection to the pathos of liberalism is that all external sympathy is misplaced, that any available sympathy should be drawn toward my own collapsed ego just as light is drawn backward into a black hole, that your sympathy and my own self-pity should merge perfectly with no wasted remainder.

If you move through the hours of the day oblivious to the great events transpiring in the world, you are living in an enviable bubble. But even if you are well-informed, you may still be living in another, different kind of bubble, oblivious to the benighted and in the long run not inconsequential ignorance of the cable-fed common man.

History is dynamic. The trouble with demagogues is not just that they start with false ideas, but that they proceed guided only by a hideous inner certainty until arriving at the destruction of themselves and their followers, as when Germany was led to invade Russia.

Perhaps you can live with things the way they are. But can you live with the way they are going to be, if all of this continues? Me, I’m praying that history really is a cycle and thus may reverse its damages, so that everything that’s being laid to waste today will take root again and start to grow back. An informed electorate, a competent administration, an independent and critical press — may they die again only after my time.