The number one New York Times bestselling author of Bias delivers another bombshell-this time aimed at . . . 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America No preaching. No pontificating. Just some uncommon sense about the things that have made this country great-and the culprits who are screwing it up. Bernard Goldberg takes dead aim at the America Bashers (the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at "ordinary" Americans) . . . the Hollywood Blowhards (incredibly ditzy celebrities who think they're smart just because they're famous) . . . the TV Schlockmeisters (including the one whose show has been compared to a churning mass of maggots devouring rotten meat) . . . the Intellectual Thugs (bigwigs at some of our best colleges, whose views run the gamut from left wing to far left wing) . . . and many more. Goldberg names names, counting down the villains in his rogues' gallery from 100 all the way to 1-and, yes, you-know-who is number 37. Some supposedly "serious" journalists also made the list, including the journalist-diva who sold out her integrity and hosted one of the dumbest hours in the history of network television news. And there are those famous miscreants who have made America a nastier place than it ought to be-a far more selfish, vulgar, and cynical place. But Goldberg doesn't just round up the usual suspects we have come to know and detest. He also exposes some of the people who operate away from the limelight but still manage to pull a lot of strings and do all sorts of harm to our culture. Most of all, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America is about a country where as long as anything goes, as one of the good guys in the book puts it, sooner or later everything will go. This is serious stuff for sure. But Goldberg will also make you laugh as he harpoons scoundrels like the congresswoman who thinks there aren't enough hurricanes named after black people, and the environmentalist to the stars who yells at total strangers driving SUVs-even though she tools around the country in a gas-guzzling private jet. With Bias, Bernard Goldberg took us behind the scenes and exposed the way Big Journalism distorts the news. Now he has written a book that goes even further. This time he casts his eye on American culture at large-and the result is a book that is sure to become the voice of all those Americans who feel that no one is speaking for them on perhaps the most vital issue of all: the kind of country in which we want to live.

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
(and Al Franken Is #37)

Chapter One

America Bashers

Why do so many americans who ought to know better find the United States such a terrible place?

Maybe "terrible" isn't exactly the right word, but it's pretty close. So are "corrupt" and "immoral" and "dishonorable" and a whole bunch of other words just like those. America never quite seems to get it right, as far as these people are concerned. If something bad happens someplace in the world, it's got to be our fault. And not just because our plans went bad, but because our motives were all wrong. Day in and day out, in their eyes, America comes up short. This country, as far as they're concerned, is a never-ending source of embarrassment. They just don't trust America to do the right thing -- because, to them, this is a land of bottomless stupidity andeternal sin.

Whom exactly are we talking about? Unfortunately, not just drugged-out revolutionaries on the fringe, the kind of people we could simply write off as crackpots. And not mainly college kids, either, which would at least be a kind of excuse. No, the America Bashers these days are in the mainstream, in the top ranks of the nation's intelligentsia and cultural elite -- professors at some of our top schools, journalists at some of our most important news organizations, celebrities in Hollywood, and, of course, Michael Moore,the reigning king of America Bashers, who deserves a category all hisown.

Moore once told a British newspaper that the United States is a country that "is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe." And just hours after the attacks of September 11, he posted this lovely message on his Web site: "Many families have been devastated tonight," he wrote. "This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination ofCalifornia -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

Can you imagine if Rush Limbaugh had said something like this? Not even the lunatic fringe would have embraced him. But Michael Moore says something this dumb and it doesn't even register with the cultural elite as over the line, let alone flat-out disgusting. To the contrary -- or au contraire, as they say in France where Michael Moore is even bigger than Jerry Lewis -- liberals continue to celebrate him as a national treasure, as a courageous voice of sanity. When his documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, premiered in Washington, he invited to the gala some of the city's most elite Democrats, who applauded enthusiastically throughout the movie, then,when it was over, gave him a standing ovation. Make no mistake: Michael Moore isn't the court jester. He's not a Yippie like Abbie Hoffman in 1968. Millions of mainstream liberals who once looked up to JFK are now idolizing this guy!

And the fact that so many America Bashers are middle-aged, like Michael Moore, helps explain where they're coming from, to use that old phrase. They are of a generation -- or, more precisely, they are of a part of a generation -- that long ago defined itself by its skepticism about everything America is and everything America does. Most of these people came of age during Vietnam, and in some important ways, they've never moved beyond one of the corebeliefs of those days: that America is a bully, that it is an oppressor,and that standing up and saying so automatically defines you as adecent and moral person -- no matter how you behave in the rest ofyour life.

With that in mind, consider the reaction of such people to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Decent Americans, of course, were offended by the revelations of what went on there. But was it a horror comparable to the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where hundreds of unarmed men, women, children, and old people were taken out and slaughtered in cold blood by American troops?

The very question is obscene.

But not to the America Bashers, including many in the mainstreampress. To them, what happened at Abu Ghraib was less a tragedy than an opportunity -- one more chance to reveal America as depraved and dishonorable.

Take Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, two of the most popular liberal pundits at the New York Times.

If you read Rich on Abu Ghraib, you sense his thrill at thechance to relive glory days gone by, when he and his pals were runningaround the Harvard campus playing at revolution. "It was inNovember 1969," he wrote in his May 9, 2004, column, "that alittle-known reporter, Seymour Hersh, broke the story of the 1968massacre at My Lai, the horrific scoop that has now found itsmatch 35 years later in Mr. Hersh's New Yorker revelation of a 53-page Army report detailing 'numerous instances of sadistic, blatantand wanton criminal abuse' at Abu Ghraib."

If Frank Rich were as stupid as he seems to think most Americansare, such an absurd exaggeration might be understandable, ifnot excusable. But, much as he may lack common sense, he is notstupid.What he is (aside from snide and vicious) is deeply committedto a false vision of America and its people. It's exactly the way alienated rich kids (like Frank Rich) used to write for their collegepapers back in the 60s. The difference is, now they do it in thepages of the New York Times.

Or take Paul Krugman, the most ideologically left-wing columniston the Times' op-ed page, which is no small feat. On May 11, two days after the Frank Rich column, Krugman hopped on the My Laiexpress with this brilliant observation: "Seymour Hersh is exposingMy Lai all over again." For Paul Krugman, and for many of his devotedreaders who eagerly embrace his warped view of America andits military, this blatant absurdity had become a simple fact. It was,after all, in the New York Times. What more does anybody need?

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
(and Al Franken Is #37). Copyright © by Bernard Goldberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from 110 People Who Are Screwing up America: And Al Franken Is #37 by Bernard Goldberg
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