Book List... 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37)

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

"FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the process of becoming more tolerant, Goldberg says, America has become indiscriminately tolerant - tolerant of all sorts of garbage in our culture. And this is not the work of some vague, irresistible natural force. Specific people are to blame, and Goldberg names names. 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America is an important, hard-hitting, sometimes laugh-out-loud take on the individuals who are personally responsible for our current state of affairs.

A slow poison is running through America’s veins, says Bernie Goldberg. It’s a poison that is turning America into a far nastier place than it ought to be, a more selfish and cynical place, a less decent and civil place. It’s easy to believe that it’s nobody’s fault; that this is just the way society has evolved. But that’s not true. There are specific individuals who, in various ways, are screwing things up in this county - people who are changing America in ways that erode its very ethical and moral underpinnings.

100 People is about those villains - about the various poisons they spread and the damage each does. In short, this is a book about the very real people who are doing us very real harm - people who, Goldberg says, need to be held accountable.

In a series of short, punchy, sometimes funny chapters, Goldberg introduces the specific types: the Schlockmeisters, the Pinstripe Crooks, the Intellectual Thugs, the Hollywood Loudmouths, and the American Jackals, (a.k.a. The Out-for-Themsleves-Screw-Everyone-Else Lawyers). Then Goldberg names 100 of the worst - from people like Jerry Springer and Ludacris to Michael Moore and Al Franken.

This book will tap into a deep frustration that has been building in this country for years. It will be the voice for 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 they want to live."

Excellent book, but, as Goldberg says in his opening, no one else in the world is going to think he got all the right people OR he got them in the right order, but it's too darn close to be ignored!

To pick a random chapter:

*Ingrid Newkirk #49 (PETA)*

"Six million Jews did in the concentration camps but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses." -IN, Washington Post, Nov. 13, 1983

"Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it." -IN, Vogue, Sept. 1989

"There's no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals." -IN, (same article as above)

'Want more? Try this: After learning of a horrific suicide bombing in Israel, Newkirk wrote a letter to Yasser Arafat- because a donkey was used.

"We have recieved many calls and letters from people shocked by the bombing in Jerusalem, in which a donkey, laden with explosives, was intentionally blown up," she wrote to Arafat. "If you have the oppurtunity, will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of the conflict?"

'When Washington Post columist asked Newkirk if she would try to persuade Arafat not to blow people up too, she replied, "It's not my business to inject myself into human wars."'

Woooooooooooooooooooooah.... Talk about someone who's missing several bulbs upstairs, right? Makes me ill...

(And before anyone asks, this is a review of my summer/spring reading list in bits and part- I haven't read them all in the last week, lol. I mean, limit to what else I could have done during my sister's swim practice, right?)