Still others ruining our country

And once again we turn to those among us who are messing up our country, as indicated by Bernard Goldberg in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing up America. In some cases they are still active while in other cases they may have left the scene but what they started is still in place, continuing the destruction.

Oliver Stone is a successful director in Hollywood, who, according to Goldberg, is a "leftist with paranoid fantasies about sinister forces running America." He distorts history and pretends that he's setting it straight. In 1991 he had a movie called JFK in which everybody was involved with the assassination of the President -- high officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police force, all three armed services, big business, and the White House. Stephen Ambrose, the famous historian, says Stone has a basic contempt for real scholarship. "He feels free not merely to conjecture but also to invent scenes that never happened, to give one man's words to another." I am very uncomfortable with all the "docudramas" on TV and at the movies since it's often very difficult to determine where the truth lies.

John Vasconcellos was a California state senator. He was a big fan for the self-esteem movement. Because of his work, legislation was produced which promoted self-esteem throughout the California school system. Guess what the consequences were. Yep, Goldberg says no fewer than 10,000 research studies have now shown that, in academic terms, self-esteem curricula are worse than useless. Test scores fell, and the movement had no effect on drug use or crime. Here's the good news -- while American students are lagging behind Asian counterparts in math, they outrank them in self-confidence. Even the Los Angeles Times figured this out in an article summing up this experiment with American kids -- "Encouraging students to love themselves is not paying off in the classroom, educators and researchers say. The time is better spent, they say, on teaching the basics." Wow, who would've thought!

Ingrid Newkirk is cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group. She's had some lovely things to say: "6 million Jews died in concentration camps, but 6 billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses." "Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it." "There is 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." Once when she heard of a horrific suicide bombing in Israel, she wrote a letter to Yasser Arafat, complaining that a donkey was used in the bombing. When a newspaper columnist asked her if she would try to persuade Arafat not to blow up people too, she replied, "It's not my business to inject myself into human wars." A lovely person, don't you think?

Maxine Waters is a well-known representative to Congress from California. When her Los Angeles district was laid waste by devastating riots in 1992, her first instinct was to defend the criminals. The riots, according to her, were not really riots at all, but a "rebellion... a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration." Here's how she handled the drug epidemic in urban America -- she said the CIA created the problem by promoting drug use in the inner cities. "I'm going to make somebody pay for what they've done to my community and to my people." Waters has even defended an escaped murderer, Joanne Chesimard, former leader of the Black Panthers, who was sentenced to life in prison for gunning down a New Jersey State Highway Patrol officer she had already shot and wounded. After her escape Chesimard ended up in Cuba where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro. Waters wrote Castro asking him to let her stay and even compared this woman to Martin Luther King. According to Waters, "She was persecuted as a result of her political beliefs and affiliations." I like what one columnist said about Waters: "She is one of the most self-serving, hate-filled, race-obsessed politicians in America, and the Democratic Party doesn't just embrace her. It kneels at her feet." Unfortunately, she's not the only one who stakes out these positions.

OK, time to relax after reading about these folks. Take a deep breath . . . ah, that's better. Maybe one more blog on still others next time.