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100 People Who Are Screwing Up America

Name: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
Author: Bernard Goldberg

Bernard Goldberg

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352 pages
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eBook - ePub

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America

Bernard Goldberg

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About This Book

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.

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Information

Publisher

HarperCollins e-books

Year

2009

ISBN

9780061737909

Topic

Sciences sociales

Subtopic

Culture populaire

The LIST

100

Rick and Kathy Hilton

OKAY, PARIS HILTON has an excuse. She’s a moron. But her parents can’t be let off so easily.

If they gave Nobel Prizes for the mom and dad who raised the most vapid, empty-headed, inane, hollow, vain, tasteless, self-centered, useless twerp in the entire country—maybe in the entire world—Rick and Kathy Hilton would be on their way to Stockholm to pick up the medal.

Paris wears designer T-shirts with slogans like “Got Blow?” and has said, “Wal-Mart? What’s that? Do they, like, make walls there?” She’s made headlines for shoving her way to the head of a wash-room line, and when upbraided for her rudeness, said she just wanted to look at herself in the mirror. And, as everyone knows, she’s a big movie star—if you count having sex in a home video that has made its way around the world on the Internet as being a movie star.

But Rick and Kathy’s little celebutante insists she’s misunderstood. The bad press “sucks,” she pouts, and she thinks that “people are mean.”

Congratulations, Rick and Kathy. You did a fine job. People are mean—especially to heir-heads like your daughter.

99

Matthew Lesko

MATTHEW LESKO.

Name doesn’t ring a bell, you say. Maybe this will help: You’re watching cable television, probably late at night, a commercial comes on, and there’s a “grown-up” man wearing big eyeglasses, a black suit emblazoned with lime green question marks, and a lime green bow-tie emblazoned with lime green question marks, and while he’s prancing around in front of the Capitol building in Washington, he’s shouting in a high-pitched voice about all the “free money” the government has… just for you!

Want $100,000 to start a business in your own house? Lesko tells you how to get it. How about $75,000 to remodel that house? You say you always wanted to open a bookstore? The government’s got $140,000 for you, and Matthew Lesko will help you get your grubby little hands on it. And, of course, there’s all that “free money to pay your bills.”

Right, that Matthew Lesko! The sort of embarrassing doofus you pray your daughter will never bring home and introduce as her fiancé. So, no, as evil goes, he’s not exactly in the same league as Osama bin Laden.

Yet this character, who has devoted what passes for his adult life to peddling his books and CDs on how to get “free college money” and “free stuff for moms” and “free money to change your life” does stand for something disheartening that’s happened to this country in recent years. Once, it was understood by almost everyone that there is no free lunch and that you got yours, as the old commercial had it, “the old-fashioned way”—you earned it! But now, this joker caters to a mindset that believes there’s not only free lunch, but free dinner, and free midnight snacks, and a takeout bag if you’re still hungry later on. Matthew Lesko is the Pied Piper for way too many Americans who are interested only in themselves.

Because, of course, the “free money” Lesko is talking about isn’t really free at all. It’s “tax money,” which, in his way of thinking, is “everybody’s money,” otherwise known as “nobody’s money.”

A lot of us would argue that it’s bad enough that slimy politicians take our money in the first place so they can hand it out as “free money” to somebody who wants to open a pizza parlor in Akron. But do we really need Matthew Lesko making himself the go-between, the conduit, between our money and the pizzeria?

And then, in December 2004, the New York State Consumer Protection Board issued a report suggesting that Mr. Lesko may have been—oh, let’s be generous—exaggerating in his commercials.

For example: Lesko once claimed that a researcher was given $500,000 by the government “to travel the world.” Turns out, the researcher was a physicist from Georgetown who won a grant from the National Science Foundation.

For another example: Lesko has said his books tell you how to get free car repairs. Actually he was talking about an automobile recall by the manufacturer.

And then there was the pitch about how you could get $400 a week if you were out of work. True enough. It’s called “unemployment insurance.”

“Lesko is now promoting a new book… by claiming that the federal government has more than $350 billion in hidden money that ordinary people can use to pay their credit-card bills and get out of debt,” said Teresa Santiago, the chairwoman of the Consumer Protection Board. “That claim is simply not true.”

On his Web site, Lesko shot back: “I provide my customers with legitimate sources of government money for business, education, housing and, yes, to pay bills.”

Okay, so here’s an idea, Matthew: Take some of that “free” money from “legitimate sources of government,” buy a plane ticket to Outer Mongolia—and stay there.

98

Sheila Jackson Lee

SHEILA JACKSON LEE is a black Democratic congresswoman from Texas who has put her finger on one of the great problems facing African-Americans in these United States of America.

There aren’t any hurricanes named after black people.

I guess that means there aren’t enough hurricanes named Keisha, Jamal, DeShawn, or LaToya. I mean, black people also have names like (such well-known recent hurricanes as) Charley and Frances, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she’s talking about.

Congresswoman Lee believes hurricane names shortchange black kids, according to a story in the July 9, 2003, edition of The Hill, “the newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress,” as it proclaims on its masthead. “All racial groups should be represented,” Lee said, according to The Hill. She hoped federal weather officials “would try to be inclusive of African-American names.”

That’s right. Hurricane names like Andrew and Bonnie and Ivan are just too darn white. This is not fair to all those black children who are left out. We need affirmative action when it comes to naming catastrophic storms. Right on, sister!

I can hear Dan Rather now, called out of semiretirement to chase one more hurricane, in his yellow slicker, blowing around in 135-mile-an-hour winds, hanging on to a telephone pole for dear life, microphone in hand, Dan parallel to the ground several feet below: “This vicious, killer storm—Shaniqua—is barreling through Pensacola at this very moment, destroying everything in sight. I’ll bet you a ten-pound bag of unsalted goobers to a sack of horse feathers that no one in his right mind wants this big bad girl Shaniqua anywhere near where they live.”

Or Brian Williams, in his blazer, calmly sitting in the NBC studio in New York, comes on and says, “Last month’s hurricane Bruce didn’t cause much damage at all, but this one, this hurricane Dexter X is something else altogether, responsible for more mayhem and destruction that any in recent memory. This one is causing even more misery than Shaniqua did back in August, and Shaniqua, you may recall, was one big bad girl.”

Oh yeah, I’m sure that would make black people throughout the United States pleased as Punch, forgive the lily-white cliché. “We’re finally getting our due in this white racist culture,” the affirmative-action-for-hurricane-names crowd would say. “Now we have hurricanes named after our black children, too. Why should whitey get all the glory?”

Here’s a news flash for the congresswoman: Hurricanes are bad. They’re deadly. People don’t like them. If I were you, I’d try to pass a law mandating that all hurricane names—without exception—be restricted to Biff and Skip and Muffy, as a kind of reparation for all the bad stuff that has happened to black people over the years in this country.

“What could she have been thinking?” as La Shawn Barber (a black woman) asks on America’s Voices, a conservative Web site. “That black children watching ‘Hurricane Denzel’ wreak havoc in their neighborhoods would gain higher self-esteem? That seeing a family member lost in a flood brought on by ‘Tropical Storm Tanisha’ would fill them with racial pride?”

Here’s a suggestion for the congresswoman that comes from the philosopher William James, who said about a hundred years ago, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” Like the names they give hurricanes, Congresswoman.

97

Todd Goldman

HIS NAME IS TODD GOLDMAN, but I like to think of him as the T-shirt Genius.

Why? Well, because Todd Goldman is the “brains” behind a line of boy-bashing T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like these:

“Boys Are Stupid. Throw Rocks at Them!” (The image on the shirt shows a bunch of rocks flying through the air toward a stick-figure boy’s head.)

“Lobotomy—How to Train Boys.”

“Boys Cheat… Cut Off Their Feet.” (The T-shirt shows a girl holding a bloody butcher knife while the footless boy “stands” in a pool of blood.)

“Boys Are Stupid… Run Them Over.”

“Boys Are Smelly… Kick Them in the Belly!” (The girl in this one, as you might imagine, is doing just what the T-shirt says.)

“Boys Make Good Pets, Everyone Should Own One.”

“Stupid Factory—Where Boys Are Made.”

“The reason we have boys [on the shirts] is that our customers are teenage girls,” Goldman says. On a TV show, he was asked if he had an “obligation to consider the impact” of the products on young boys. “No” was his answer. In fact, when people raise objections to his boy-bashing T-shirts, it makes him laugh—all the way to the bank. “I couldn’t pay for this press,” as he put it.

You see, it’s nothing personal, just business.

The fact is we live in a time when it’s become okay to belittle not only men, but also future men. Never mind that in almost every negative statistical category—from failure in school to suicide— boys today are in worse shape than girls, and the gap is only increasing. Feminism has made it okay for women—and a certain kind of man—to laugh at boys.

And these days there are all sorts of entrepreneurs out there cashing in on the boy-bashing craze. One of them is a guy named Jim Benton, an artist and children’s author who puts his put-downs on all sorts of things you can buy, like stickers and notebooks and air fresheners and clothing and who knows what else. His main character is a happy bunny icon that says things like “You suck big time” and “Hi, scumbag.” But Jim also sells stuff that says, “Boys lie and kind of stink.” Would he do a line of girl-bashing shirts or stickers or air fresheners that say, “Little Girls Are Nasty and Mean And Grow Up To Be Angry Feminists”? Surely you jest.

“I don’t find misogyny funny,” as the oh-so-politically-correct Mr. Benton puts it. “I do find girls’ contempt of men funny.”

He may have a point. Maybe I’m taking this stuff too seriously. Maybe these T-shirts really are funny. Maybe they’re so funny that Benton and Goldman should expand their product lines so they can make even more money. So here are a few suggestions, which I offer to them free of charge:

“Black Folks Are Stupid. Throw Rocks at Them.”

“Jews Are Smelly… Kick Them in the Belly.”

“Stupid Factory—Where Mexicans Are Made.”

“Homos Make Good Pets, Everyone Should Own One.”

Hilarious, don’t you think? And besides, it’s nothing personal, just business.

96

Eve Ensler

YOU KNOW THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS? Think of Eve Ensler as the Loon Trying to Steal Valentine’s Day!

That’s not how Ensler thinks of herself, of course. She thinks of herself as a wise and compassionate freethinker and social activist. And most important—trust me, folks, this is not a joke—she thinks of herself as the Vagina Woman. In fact, Ensler is so proud of the vagina—her own and that of every other woman—that she wrote a very important play about it, called The Vagina Monologues.

The Vagina Monologues is basically a bunch of sketches featuring women talking about—guess!—right, their vaginas. The New York Times says the show is Ensler’s “crusade to wipe out the shame and embarrassment that many women still associate with their bodies or their sexuality.” Ensler’s chosen method for wiping out shame and embarrassment is shouting out the word “vagina” from the proverbial rooftops—in the play, more than a hundred times, though not all in a row (thank God).

But that’s just part of her agenda. The other part has to do with men and—take another guess!—right again, all the rotten things they do. In fact, all this free and easy vagina talk is also supposed to be a way to empower women to fight what Ensler—who tosses around the disc...