John Hawkins interviews Bernard Goldberg

I love Bernard Goldberg's books. I think he's a great writer, and he's got a way of putting things just perfectly. And I absolutely cannot wait to read his new book, Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve.

So when John Hawkins, my absolute favorite blogger, interviewed Bernard Goldberg, one of my absolute favorite writers, I knew it was a must read. And it did not disappoint.

Here is one of my favorite excerpts:

John Hawkins: Well, let me ask you this: what has happened to the Democratic Party? How is it that they've gotten so far away from what people like you believe in, in so many areas?

Bernard Goldberg: That's a very good question. I think it started -- I don't want to do a history thing here -- but I think it started with McGovern. That's when the party became elitist. That's when the delegation to the National Democratic convention, for instance, the Iowa delegation, didn't have any farmers. But, they had more than a few people who had graduate degrees. I'm not against a lot of education…but I think that's when the party started to become too elitist for my taste.

Then, we'll just bring it up to the current day and skip over all the middle stuff... I think with the election of George Bush in the year 2000… that's when liberals said he stole the election, and they've never really gotten over it. That's when liberals who used to be the upbeat ones, the optimistic ones, started getting angrier and angrier. That's when they started losing people like me.

My story resonates with millions and millions and millions of other Americans who started up on the left, and wound up on the right because they didn't feel comfortable in the Democratic Party anymore. It became a party of grievances. You know, in the beginning, I was for civil rights... I still am. But, being for civil rights at some point wasn't good enough, now I have to be for racial preferences. I have to be for a system that decides who gets into college, who gets government jobs, and gets government contracts largely based on the color of their skin. What's liberal about that? That's not liberal. That's the opposite of what Martin Luther King talked about, judging people based on the content of the character, not the color of their skin.

I was for women's rights, but then that wasn't enough, and I had to be for the right of a woman to be firefighter, if she wanted to be, even if she wasn't strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building. I don't think a woman has an inalienable right to be a firefighter.

Free speech, that's what liberals were really about. Look at any college campus today where there's a demonstration against somebody speaking, where they shout down somebody speaking because they don't like what that person is saying, and inevitably, the people doing the shouting down will be liberal students.

I said, "You know what, that's not for me anymore."

Read it all here.