100 People Screwing Up America

I couldn’t resist Bernard Goldberg’s “100 People Who are Screwing up America”. Fun and easy read, and no, all the people in the book are not from the left … Ann Coulter, the Enron, World Com, and other Corporate excess types get roasted as well. It is however mostly predictable … the bias of the press (his first very good, and very successful book was called “Bias”), the extremes of the left, and the excess of sports and the media all get their turn.

His number two pick was Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and he included a revealing editorial that does a good job of showing the lunacy of press bias. 

On January 1, ’95, the Times provided this editorial:

“In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from IA, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which Senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, … an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.”

On March 6, 2005, they provided the following:

“The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House’s judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history, … To block nominees, the Democrats’ weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. … The Bush administration likes to call itself “conservative”, but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.”

Notice any difference? I suppose the true lefties will find some fig leave to cover the nakedness of that bias, but those that are that far gone won’t be coming back to reality anytime soon in any case.

Teddy, secretarial swimming coach, Kennedy was only #3. I really liked Bernie’s analysis of a famous Teddy bloviation on the Iraq war: 

 “a fraud made up in Texas to give Republicans a political boost”.  (Teddy) 

“This is pretty serious stuff-charging that the president of the United States went to war to win reelection. And exactly how would that work? Let’s see, President Bush takes a nation to war, an enormously risky political proposition, says the reason that we’re going to war is that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, even though the president KNOWS the weapons don’t really exist, and that sooner or later, certainly before the election, EVERYONE will know they don’t exist … and he does this to “give Republicans a political boost”? Am I missing something?”

Very well put I think, and the kind of logic that fortunately 51% of Americans had no trouble parsing. The idea that Americans are going to re-elect a President because we are war is of course also absurd. We only need to go back to LBJ, which is likely a major reason that the Democrats and the media spent so much time in ’04 trying to tie Iraq to Vietnam. Other than just not having anything else to run on after a wasted 20 years in the Senate, I’m pretty sure that is another reason that Kerry wanted to talk so much about Vietnam, and to make a connection to Iraq in every way he possibly could.

The book was entertaining, and I like his writing style. Michael Moore was #1, and as it says on the cover Al Franken was #37. High in entertainment, low in significant content, perfect for a nice summer read.