Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve

by Bernard Goldberg

Overview

Enough of the leftist lunatics like Rosie O'Donnell who think "Radical Christians" are "as big a threat to America as Radical Muslims." Enough of the hyperbolic liberal rhetoric comparing Bush to Saddam and Mel Gibson to Hitler. Enough of the hyper-partisan, ultra-PC liberal media, which often seem more sympathetic to the "victims of humiliation" at Abu Ghraib than to our troops dying at the hands of Iraqi fundamentalists.

Enough, too, of the gutless wonders on the right who don't have the courage to stand up for their own convictions. Enough of their pandering, trolling for votes, and outspending the Democrats.

Now with powerful and provocative new material, Bernard Goldberg's Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right sounds an even louder alarm than before—warning that, if the wimps on the right don't regain their courage and reclaim their principles, the crazies on the left just might win the White House in '08.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061747854
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	588 KB

About the Author

Bernard Goldberg is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Bias, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, and Arrogance. He has won eight Emmy Awards for his work at CBS News and at HBO, where he now reports for the acclaimed program Real Sports. In 2006 he won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, the most prestigious of all broadcast journalism awards.

Date of Birth:

May 31, 1945

Place of Birth:

New York, NY

Read an Excerpt

Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right
How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve

Chapter One

Crazies to the Left of Me . . .

When I was growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, I didn't know about liberals or conservatives. But I did know about the New York Yankees.

The Yanks were my life back then. Sometimes when they'd lose, which was almost never, I would stop eating. When I was ten years old, I was the Mahatma Gandhi of the Bronx. Gandhi fasted for long stretches in order to change an oppressive social order. I fasted for maybe a day until Mickey or Yogi or one of the other Bronx Bombers knocked one out of the park and the Yankees won again. In both cases, going without food highlighted a terrible injustice, and in the end our sacrifices made the world a better place.

Back then, the Yankees' many critics (most of them sore losers from Brooklyn) would say that rooting for the Yanks was like rooting for General Motors. As a kid I didn't quite grasp the meaning, but I knew it wasn't good. General Motors was big business, the embodiment of corporate power. GM was—forgive my language—Republican!

Which meant the tycoons who ran General Motors went to snooty country clubs and ate expensive meals at fancy restaurants. We hung out on the roof of the tenement—a place we called "tar beach"—and ate at diners; that is, on those rare occasions when we ate out at all. Republicans didn't represent us. We were Democrats. And I can honestly say that during my entire childhood in the Bronx, I never met even one Republican there. Not one. Frankly, I don't think they existed.

TheDemocrats were for the "working man," just like my father, who got up before dawn every day and headed off to a factory where he ran big, clanking machines that put embroidery on dresses and tablecloths and just about anything else. He worked hard and although he never made a lot of money he always took care of his family. He and all the others like him were the blue-collar backbone of the Democratic Party.

None of the men I knew growing up had white-collar jobs. They all worked in factories, like my father did, or in little dry-goods stores selling hats and coats, or in garages fixing cars. The women stayed home and took care of the kids. None of them had jobs outside the house. That would have reflected badly on their husbands, an indication that the man of the house couldn't provide for his own family. None of the grown-ups had gone to college. Most of them hadn't even finished high school, which wasn't the least bit unusual in those days. Their savior was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who got them through the dark days of the Great Depression. FDR, because of his polio, could hardly move without a wheelchair. But to the faithful where I grew up, he could walk on water.

So, it's not exactly a mystery why years later, when my interests extended beyond Yankee Stadium, I took the road my parents had traveled and became a Democrat. I didn't even have to think about it. It's just who I was. Up North we were all liberal Democrats, of course, but on the news we heard about the other kind of Democrat, who lived in the South, the conservative kind. But in those days no decent person, certainly not after the civil rights movement began, would get caught so much as washing his hands in the same sink as a conservative. They were not like us. They were bigots and cowards who had to hide behind a flimsy excuse they called states' rights, and the muscle of nasty sheriffs, to hang on to a way of life that struck many of us as not worth hanging on to. I despised conservatives back then.

In the early '60s, when I was still in high school, we took our first long family road trip south, to visit relatives in faraway, exotic Florida. We traveled in my dad's prized possession, a two-tone, black and white, 1954 Plymouth, which he would polish with an old rag every chance he got. Someplace in the South—Virginia, or one of the Carolinas maybe—we pulled into an old, wooden roadside restaurant for lunch. This was still the Old South, remember, and before we even got out of the car, I saw the sign, one I had only seen before on television and in the newspaper. No coloreds allowed, it said.

My parents weren't bigots. They were appalled, like decent people everywhere, when they watched the news and saw Bull Connor sending his dogs after civil rights marchers, or state troopers beating black people with nightsticks just because they wanted the same rights as everyone else had in America. And they even knew, I suspect, that the same kind of people who didn't want blacks in their restaurant didn't want our kind—Jews—in there, either. But my parents were of a certain generation, and so they were willing to accommodate the bigotry—or at least turn a blind eye—in order to get a sandwich, a soda, and get the hell out of there.

They didn't want to rock the boat. I, on the other hand, at seventeen, wanted to sink the damn thing with every last racist son of a bitch in it. So I told my folks that I would wait in the car while they and my little brother went inside to eat. But, as it turned out, they decided not to go in, either. And before you could say "Jim Crow," we were back on the highway heading south.

It was exciting to be a liberal in the 1960s. America was changing and we were on the right side, the side of equality and decency and fair play. That's what the country was about, wasn't it? Being a liberal back then made me proud. Conservatives, on the other hand, were on the wrong side of history. They were an embarrassment.

Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right
How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve. Copyright © by Bernard Goldberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Just My Luck: I'm on One Side and They Lose Their Minds...I Go to the Other Side and They Lose Their Cojones
Crazies to the Left of Me...     3
Wimps to the Right...     18
Q: Which One Doesn't Belong: George Bush, Don Imus, or Charles Barkley? A: Sir Charles. He's the Only One with the Guts to Tell the Truth About Race
Don Imus and Sir Charles     27
Folding Like a Cheap Accordion-and Other Ways to Pander on Race     32
Q: What's the Difference Between Fox News and Ann Coulter? A: Ann Coulter Also Drives Some Conservatives Crazy
Fox Derangement Syndrome     41
Do the Ends Justify the Meanness?     45
Just What We Need: A City with Rice-A-Roni and a Foreign Policy... and Four Other Reasons Liberals Are Even Crazier Than We Thought
Was I in a Coma When San Francisco Seceded?     51
Alec Baldwin Is Not Saddam Hussein-at Least I Don't Think So     55
John Wayne, Girly Men, and the Democratic Party     61
We're All Doomed. Or Not     64
So-called Apocalypse Now     70
How the Religious Right (and the Loony Left) Turned Barry Goldwater into a Liberal
In the Beginning...     77
Church, State, and Taxicabs in Minneapolis     83
Political Science     88
Being Liberal Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
A Witch Hunt in Durham     95
The Passion of the Left     103
Change the Channel     108
Survive This!     112
W's Catch-22     115
This Just In...     118
Good Jew, Bad Jew     122
Never Mind     132
Donkeys to the Left of Me... Pigs to the Right
His Brother Was Worse     137
The Princes of Pork     141
Extreme Makeover: Republican Edition     147
Islam Is a Religion of Peace, and If You Don't Believe Me I'll Kill You
Profiles in Foolishness     151
See No Evil     158
What's Round, Lisps, Cracks Jokes, and Kills Jews?     163
The "Moderates" Are a Little Nutty, Too     167
Good Television     173
On Second Thought...     177
All the News That Fits Their Ideology (Part 1)
My Head Wants to Explode     183
And Then There's the News That's Unfit to Print...     188
We Don't Need No Stinking Principles
It's a Wonderful Life. Or Not     195
A Rare Politician with Guts     200
Speak English, Por Favor     204
If Katie Couric Is Jackie Robinson, Does That Make Bob Schieffer Martin Luther King Jr.?
No She Isn't     211
Who Got Dan Rather?     214
What Courage?     219
Mike Wallace in Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood     223
Uncomfortable Questions     229
All the News That Fits Their Ideology (Part 2)
It's in Their DNA     239
Clueless in Manhattan     242
Letters from the Fringe     247
My Plans to Fix the World
My Plan to Fix Affirmative Action     253
My Plan for Peace in the Middle East     257
My Plan to End Pork     261
A Few Final Words...
MoveOn.Jerk     267
Why the Crazies Are on Top (for Now)     271
Acknowledgments     279