GOLDBERG'S HUNDRED: I heartily recommend Bernard Goldberg's new book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America: (and Al Franken Is #37). Read it over the weekend and found it smart, funny, fierce, and completely unpretentious. That's not easy with a book like this, because author who writes a series of profiles about people he finds morally bereft runs the risk of sounding very full of himself. Not Goldberg: he's refreshingly free from preaching, yet disarmingly candid about why he believes each of the hundred belongs on the list. Check out this short National Review Q & A with the author, who of course took on the mainsteam media with his previous books Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite. Like me, Goldberg once considered himself a liberal, when liberalism wasn't synonymous with blaming America for everything that goes wrong in the world, and abandoning moral discourse to rampant moral relativism. I'm rooting for his book to be a big success, largely so one of our keenest media observers will find himself with a larger stage — but also to frustrate mainstream media hosts (Aaron Brown at CNN, for one) who have cancelled Goldberg appearances or who will refuse to book him at all. Then again, it's starting to be clear that a new generation of non-left authors no longer needs the MSM for access to people who read books and hold strong thoughts about the future of the culture.