Employment discrimination lawyer Richard Dooling has written fascinating commentaries on the recent Communications Decency Act, noting the devastating effect it would have on civil liberties if it weren't so unconstitutional and unenforceable. But Dooling's Blue Streak, which analyzes swearing and hate speech from a similar perspective, is less successful. For starters, he never establishes what kind of book he's writing: Is it a scholarly piece on the history and implications of what society has deemed "dirty" words? Or is it yet another crybaby, PC-bashing book about men whose lives are ruined by spurious claims of "verbal sexual harassment"? Either has its place and its audience, but Dooling restlessly jumps back and forth, making few friends early on with his insistence that Blue Streak is intended for a male audience. If it's such a for-the-boys book—what, women aren't interested in swearing?—why does Dooling slather on 10-dollar words like "hermeneutics," "contwistificaton" and "opprobrium"? Perhaps the biggest flaw in Blue Streak is Dooling's frustrating tendency to bash easy targets like "radical victim feminists," "word police," lawyers (you pay them lots of money and they spout a bunch of mumbo-jumbo!), and talk-show hosts (Phil and Oprah sure are politically correct, huh?). Many of Dooling's points (the questionable constitutionality of a federal law prohibiting insensitive speech in the workplace, concern with antipornography legislation) are worth discussing, but he's either unwilling or unable to do so without taking dumb potshots. That and the endless, trivial tangents conspire to tarnish a promising premise.