Although we have never met, I regard Bernard Goldberg as a friend. He's sent me his books, nicely dedicated; I've sent him mine. Through our frequent exchange of e- mails, I have found that he and I tend to see eye to eye on just about everything. Our chief difference, aside from the fact that I live in L.A. and he lives in Miami, is that while I play tennis, he courts serious injury playing basketball.

When I heard the title of his latest work, I figured it would provide the acid test. After all, when you go and call a book "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America," one can hardly assume that anybody is going to agree with all your choices. Well, it so happens I do!

Now, some of the names are obvious. In fact they were so obvious that before I even opened the book, I was kicking myself for not having written it. But the truth is, if I had gotten there first, the title would probably have been "The 17 People Who Are Screwing Up America," and let's face it - nobody's going to fork over $25.95 for a 50- page book.

Where Mr. Goldberg has it all over me is that he obviously takes notes. When some jerk does something really dumb or awful - unless he's somebody famous like Robert Byrd, David Duke, Howard Dean or Al Sharpton - I tend to forget his name after a day or two. As a result, while reading the book, I kept being reminded of nuisances who had slipped off my radar. I refer to people such as Michael Newdow, the anti- religious zealot who literally made a federal case out of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance; Jeff Danziger, the political cartoonist who kept his job and his liberal creds in spite of portraying Condoleezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; and Nancy Hopkins, who stomped out of a conference and initiated a public lynching of Harvard President Lawrence Summers, all because he had the temerity to wonder whether there might be innate differences between the sexes when it came to science and math.

For the record, Goldberg's top six pains in the neck are Jimmy Carter; the ACLU's national director Anthony Romero; Jesse Jackson; Ted Kennedy; New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger; and, number one, Michael Moore.

At the end of the book, my friend Bernie invites readers to come up with their own nominees. He now reports that the names that have come up most frequently are Senator Dick Durbin, the idiot who compared our soldiers at Guantanamo to Nazis and other vermin; and the five justices of the Supreme Court who cast the deciding votes in the eminent domain case.

I can't argue against those six candidates making it into Goldberg's sequel. But I had already e-mailed him my own choice. That would be Lorne Michaels. He's the fellow who created "Saturday Night Live" for NBC. At one fell swoop, he not only introduced badly written sketch comedy to a medium that had managed to reach the unimaginable heights of "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour," but he also helped to bring movie comedies to its knees. Because he unleashed people like Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, the Belushi brothers, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, Julia Sweeney, Damon Wayans, Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Janeane Garofalo, and Will Ferrell, on Hollywood, I hold him responsible for just about every lousy comedy produced over the past quarter century.

In addition to all the tripe his charges have gone off and done with others, consider the movies he has personally produced. They include "Nothing Lasts Forever," "Coneheads," "Stuart Saves His Family," "Tommy Boy," "Black Sheep," "The Ladies Man," "Superstar," "A Night at the Roxbury" and "Brain Candy." It sounds like half the items in the remainder bin at your neighborhood Blockbuster. It's no wonder that even after all these years of overseeing the sophomoric "SNL," Mr. Michaels has not given up his day job.

In spite of all that, I might have forgiven him everything for the sake of "Groundhog Day," which he had nothing to do with, but which did star SNL alum, Bill Murray.

I might have if it weren't for the fact that back in 1979, Michaels gave Al Franken a national platform. For that, alone, the man should be forgiven nothing.

You can learn more about Burt and his latest book, Conservatives Are from Mars (Liberals Are from San Francisco) at his home page. Write Mr. Prelutsky at: