Giles Coren has savaged restaurants with excoriating reviews, waged war against subeditors who mangle his columns, and now turned his ire against Amazon, accusing it of "cynical corporate rape" and comparing it to a "sicko porn site" in an extraordinary tirade on Twitter.
Is their tormentor just another sicko student?
Some critics denounced the presumed choice this week; Paul Krugman of the New York Times even claimed that Dr Gupta did not deserve the job because he unfairly attacked Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" (which in turn made the ridiculous claim that Cuba's health system is better than America's).But Dr Gupta may yet prove a clever choice, for three reasons.
The film's producers declare breathlessly that they have whisked a copy of the film's master negative overseas to avoid confiscation by the evil authorities.Ghastly though he may be, Mr Moore has had uncommon success with his previous films ("Fahrenheit 9/11" earned over $200m), and "Sicko" looks to be another conversation starter.
Such doubts are sure to be reinforced by this week's release of Michael Moore's "Sicko", a much-trumpeted new film on health care that bashes the free-market Yankee model even as it praises the dirigiste alternative north of the border.So is America's health system really red in tooth and claw?
Paul Keating, a former Labor prime minister, says they have killed the party's moral authority with "obscurantist Neanderthal views" and "sicko populism".
"SICKO", the latest film from the left-wing American agitpropagandist Michael Moore, has already drawn a lot of comment for its favourable comparison of health care in Cuba with that in the United States.
Even at the ghoulish climax, when a character is trussed up in a sicko torture-basement, the mood is punctured by the villain's choice of soundtrack – Enya, for crying out loud (or was that part of the torture?).
His big scene, in which he forces his victim to fellate a fried chicken leg, is surely destined to figure in any 50-best list of sicko cult classics.
In Roger and Me, Moore described how being the middle-class son of a General Motors employee led him to grow up in Flint, Michigan, while in Sicko he used his folks to highlight the holes in the United States healthcare system.
Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, "Sicko".
