Crazies To The Left of Me, Wimps To The Right

Bernard Goldberg “Crazies To The Left of Me, Wimps To The Right” Harper, 2007, 278 pp. Paperback

I visited a friend in Indianapolis and left with a bag of books—this is one of them, thanks Ralph.

The author, Goldberg, has won eight Emmy Awards for his work at CBS News and at HBO, where he now reports for Real Sports—this is his third book but the first of his I have read. Much like Don Quixote, I continue to search for a political position matching my own and this book comes closest in spite of its’ off-setting title and lack of windmills. One theme in this book explores the growth of a liberal bias in the media—I’ve often heard this complaint but never really considered it real, but the author does make some convincing arguments that it is. He also was originally a Democrat and later became a Republican—and now feels estranged from the Democrats and abandoned by the Republicans. I feel much the same and thus got a lot out of the book in spite of its’, at times, over-the-top shrillness. I think the title is unfortunate as it tends to attract the extremist element looking for entertainment rather than knowledge. Of course the book was written in 2007 and it is, now, entertaining to consider his warnings of what might happen if the Democrats capture the White House—say it ain’t so, Joe. (A reference to shoeless Joe Jackson of the long-ago Black Sox).

My Notes:

Pg. 7: By 1972 the Democrats were changing in some fundamental ways. They were becoming elitists. Thanks to the so-called McGovern Revolution, affluent, well-educated liberals were in—the ‘new elite,’ and blue-collar Democrats were out. All of a sudden, the biggest domestic issues on the Democratic agenda were gay rights, abortion, and hard-edged feminism. It all started with Vietnam. That’s when liberalism took a hard left turn. It wasn’t enough for liberals simply to protest the war—now they had to demonize our military. The country was in turmoil. Liberals—the new kind, anyway—were angry. Everything was about grievances. The Democrats who used to produce things—cars, steel, and foodstuffs—were being replaced by those who produce fads and fashions, things people enjoy but don’t need. Societies need teachers, soldiers, engineers, and mechanics. No one needs sitcoms, movie reviews, handbag designers, gossip columnists, or professors of gender construction, but this superfluous cadre is becoming the core of the party of Truman and Roosevelt, an alliance of the superficial and trivial, along with the hopelessly poor.

Pg. 19: Liberals do not understand Conservatives. Conservatives understand liberals, mainly because they see their influence everywhere in the culture. They’re the ones who make our TV shows and our movies, and who run the music industry. They run our network news divisions and our biggest, most important newspapers. They’re the ones who put out our news magazines and our women’s magazines. They teach our kids and run our colleges. They’re even the comedians on TV. Except for talk radio, liberals pretty much control the culture. Liberals, on the other hand, lead more sheltered lives. If they stay away from just one or two places on the radio or TV dial, they can pretty much escape conservatism in the culture.

Pg. 20: Liberals embrace affirmative action, open borders, and government solutions to problems. The author is more or less a libertarian: he believes in medical use of marijuana, opposes the Republican attempt for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, for stem cell research. Basically, he wants government to leave him alone as much as possible and opposes moralists on the Right who want to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us who live in a pluralistic society. He is fed up with pandering Republicans who sold out their principles for political power. The ones who tell us they’re for small government and then spend like Democrats.

Pg. 80: The agenda of the social Right changed from keeping the government away from our nation’s morality (opposing a ban on prayer in schools, opposing forced busing, opposing sex education) to insisting that the federal government be our moral arbiter (demanding money for faith-based initiatives, demanding abstinence education, demanding that a ban on gay marriage be written into the Constitution). Religious conservatives only became a political force after liberals began imposing their vision of morality on society. Democracy depends on reason and compromise—Religion doesn’t.

Pg. 95: The Duke Lacrosse Rape Case was a perfect morality play for the charter members of the elite liberal culture. What was not understood was that the case wasn’t about the oppression of black women by white men, but rather about the astounding power of a reckless prosecutor. If Nifong was prepared to go after innocent, privileged, white boys for political gain, how far would he go to convict poor, innocent, black defendants if someday doing that fit his political purposes?

Pg. 139: Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. Some specifics:
• Federal spending has grown twice as fast under Bush as under Clinton; 65 percent of it unrelated to national security.
• Spending on education has more than doubled since Bush took office in 2001.
• In 2001, Bush and the Republican Congress spent $286 billion on thirty-three anti-poverty programs. By 2005 the amount spent had grown to $397 billion—a 39 percent increase while inflation went up only 10 percent.

Republicans decided to build their political base by throwing money at all sorts of constituencies. They spent billions on prescription drugs for seniors and billions more for farmers and then there were the billions for school kids, which they figured wouldn’t hurt with those soccer moms in the suburbs, the ones who see themselves as moderates and can go either way in a national election.

Pg. 233: It is time for journalists to do a story concerning race in America and consider:
• Why is the black illegitimacy rate around 70 percent in this country when it was much lower (10 to 20 percent) in the 1950s, a time when institutional prejudice was far more widespread than it is today?
• How is it that black Americans of those earlier generations—people who had to deal with blatant racism every day—were able to do the right things and keep their families together, while many of those who came of age after the 1960s have succumbed to one pathology after another?
• What chance in life do babies have when they’re born to fifteen-year-old girls?
• Why do about half of all black inner-city kids drop out of high school?
• Does a kid who drops out, and can’t speak proper English, stand much of a chance of getting a good job and escaping a life of poverty?

Pg. 275: Michigan voters overwhelmingly (58 percent to 42 percent) passed an initiative to outlaw racial preferences. The initiative simply said that ‘The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.’ Opposing this initiative were the Democrats and just about every important Republican in Michigan including the Republican candidates for governor and senator.