Who's screwing up America

Someone must be responsible for the disturbingly poor state of the Union. Besides Obama, I mean. Unlike Lee Harvey Oswald, Obama didn't act alone!

Many eyes are looking (sideways) at the "liberal elites", the eggheads, the lamestream media (thank you, Sarah Palin), the Volvo-driving social reformers, the self-styled progressive thinkers -- all the "forces for good" who seem determined to tell us not just what to do but what to think.

To the number of those challenging the prevailing liberal orthodoxy, please add Bernard Goldberg, "author of the #1 bestseller Bias" and the "national bestseller Arrogance". (That's what is says on the dust jacket of the book I'm reading today.)

Mr. Goldberg was a senior correspondent on CBS's 48 Hours, and in 2005 got either promoted or demoted to HBO's Real Sports. Possibly while he was between gigs, he found time to write 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, which I just discovered in my local public library. (The Pony Express takes a while to get to this part of the continent.)

I know I'm going to like this book. It promises no preaching, no pontificating -- just some uncommon sense about the things that have made the USA great, and the culprits who are screwing it up. Goldberg takes 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 one whose show is compared to a churning mass of maggots devouring rotten meat, and
* the Intellectual Thugs -- bigwigs at some of our "best" colleges, whose views from the gamut from left wing to left wing.

That's from the blurb on the dust jacket. Here's an excerpt from the introduction.

It won't take you long to notice that there are a lot of liberals on the list.... Believe it or not, it's not so much because of their left-of-center politics that they're on the list, as because of their willingness -- make that their eagerness -- to live up to the most embarrassing stereotypes many of us hold about today's cultural-elite liberals: that they're snooty, snobby know-it-alls, who have gotten angrier and angrier in recent years and who think they're not only smarter, but also better than everyone else, especially everyone else who lives in a "Red State" -- a population they see as hopelessly dumb and pathetically religious.

And it is precisely this elitist condescension -- this smug attitude that Middle America is a land of right-wing yahoos who are so damn unenlightened that they probably don't even know where the Hamptons are -- that hurts liberals and their causes way more than it helps them. It's one of the reasons John Kerry is still a senator and not the president of the United States.

Apart from Mr. Goldberg's unfortunate love of super-complex run-on sentences, it's great stuff. Read it and then compile your own list. If you live in Canada or the UK or wherever, read it and substitute the names of the miscreants who have made your country a more selfish, vulgar, cynical and generally nasty place than it ought to be.