100 People part 3

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America

Bernard Goldberg

80 – Kitty Kelley
Sleaze merchant extraordinaire. In 1991 Kelley published a book that claimed to expose the sordid truth about Nancy Reagan. In the book’s most sensational revelation, Kelley claimed that Nancy had actually cheated on the president in the White House – with Frank Sinatra.
It was of course the trashiest of lies. Even Max Frankel, executive editor of the Times, was finally forced to acknowledge that repeating it on page one of his newspaper was a "mistake."

79 – Harry Belafonte
As far as Harry Belafonte is concerned, Colin Powell is an Uncle Tom, maybe even a "house nigger." You decide. This is what Belafonte said about Powell in an interview that aired on a San Diego radio station:
"There is an old saying, in the days of slavery. There were those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master, do exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. That gave you privilege. Colin Powell is committed to come into the house of the master, as long as he would serve the master,
according to the master’s plans. And when Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear,
he will be turned back out to pasture.
And you don’t hear much from those who live in the pasture."

78 – Norman Mailer
"This guy isn’t a murderer, he’s an artist," Norman Mailer said in 1981, pleading for the release from prison of convicted murderer-turned-writer Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning intellectual,
lobbied to get Abbott paroled. He said that to ignore his talent would be a crime and "culture is worth a little risk."
The campaign succeeded, Abbott was released and went to New York where six weeks later, Jack Henry Abbott got into an argument with a twenty-two-year-old waiter and stabbed him to death.

77 – Linda Hirshman
Not the best known feminist in town, but she just may be the most self-important, smug, condescending one in the whole bunch.
This is her view on women who choose to leave their prestigious jobs in order to stay at home with their kids: "These women are choosing lives in which they do not use their capacity for very complicated work, they’re choosing lives in which they do not use their capacity to deal with very powerful other adults in the world, which takes a lot of skill.
I think there are better lives and worse lives."
If you ever wondered why old-fashioned radical feminism
has become the butt of so many jokes
and the target of so much hostility,
if you ever wondered why it is becoming
more irrelevant by the day, now you know.

76 – Barbara Foley
What is it about higher education that encourages political idiocy?
Barbara Foley, a Marxist professor of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey posted a message on the internet, just one month after September 11, 2001, for her students. It dealt partly with readings for the class, partly with the terrorist attacks. "[W]e should be aware that, whatever it’s proximate cause, it’s ultimate cause is the fascism of u.s. [sic] foreign policy over the past many decades."
Translation: It was our fault. We brought the mayhem of 9/11 down on ourselves. And, by implication, we deserve what we got.

75 – Eric Foner
Professor of History at Columbia University, he isn’t just another run-of-the-mill left-wing academic. He’s a major-league player in his field,
a past president of the American Historical Association. Forner’s many books are used in high school and college classrooms throughout America, helping shape the perceptions of countless students about their country and its role in the world. Which is why what he had to say after September 11, 2001, matters a lot; and why it’s so depressing.
"I’m not sure which is more frightening," he said,
"the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
If the good professor truly isn’t sure which is more frightening, then a reasonable person can draw only one conclusion: That Eric Foner, despite his Ph.D., is a fool.

74 – Katha Pollitt
Just days after September 11, 2001, a journalist named Katha Pollitt,
a columnist for the left-wing magazine The Nation,
who also writes regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Times,
did a piece for The Nation called "Put Out No Flags."
"My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center," she wrote, "thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say:
The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."
After a bit of give and take, during which Ms. Pollitt half-heartedly acknowledges that her daughter may have a point about how the flag can also mean "standing together and honoring the dead," they reach a compromise. "I tell her that she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers,
but the living room is off limits." It’s heartwarming, isn’t it?

73 – Barbara Kingsolver
My daughter cam home from kindergarten and announced,
"Tomorrow we all have to wear read, white and blue."
This is how novelist and left-wing social critic Barbara Kingsolver begins an op-ed right after September 11, 2001.
"Why?" She wants to know. "For all the people that died when the airplanes hit the buildings," the little girl explains. For most Americans, this would seem like a nice, loving gesture. Not to Barbara Kingsolver.
"I fear the sound of saber-rattling, dread that not just my taxes but even my children are being dragged to the cause of death in the wake of death," she writes. She asks her daughter why she can’t simply wear black. Why does she have to wear the colors of the flag?
What does that mean, she wants to know.
"It means we’re a country. Just all people together,"
the young girl innocently replies.
When a little girl in kindergarten sounds – no, make that is –
smarter than her mother, you know there’s a problem.

72 – Ward Churchill
On September 11, 2001, 1,600 very long miles away from the very nightmarish devastation in New York City, a college professor named Ward Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, sat down to write about what happened to America that day:
"The most that can honestly be said of those involved on Sept. 11," he wrote, "is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course." Of the innocent civilians who perished in the Twin Towers, Professor Churchill had this to say: "Well, really, lets get a grip here shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."
After looking at the same horrors that the rest of us looked at, Professor Churchill, scholar that he is, decided that
the United States of America had brought it all on itself.

71 – Phil Donahue
No need to be cruel to a man whose time has come and gone. But that doesn’t mean we should go easy on him either. Phil Donahue is one of those pioneers who has had a huge effect on the most popular medium in human history, and by extension, on how we all live and think. Donahue’s show was so new and so fresh that we hardly even stopped to realize how far, even for a liberal, his ideas were from the mainstream.