The Right-Wing Pundit Political Thriller Fad

Some articles on and reviews of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window mention that before Beck, Bill O'Reilly wrote a political thriller of his own. In the last few days, I've noticed political thrillers by Oliver North and Ralph Reed in the remainder piles at my local Barnes & Noble. It hit me that right-wing political thrillers by Fox News pundits have become the latest fad. They're bestsellers, of course, with the Conservative Book Club playing the role of the Church of Scientology (which bought most of the copies of L. Ron Hubbard's later books) by gaming the sales figures. I acknowledged this in one of my short stories intended for print publication: a publisher complains about right-wing pundits jumping on the political thriller bandwagon when their left-wing counterparts have enough sense not to join them. These thrillers have two things in common: 1) they're ghostwritten 2) they're badly ghostwritten. This fad runs the risk of ruining the political thriller subgenre forever. But will these guys realize that writing stories is best left to real storytellers? I think not. Meanwhile, I'll go back to writing mine...