Mike Lofgren – “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult” (2011)
Written by Mike Lofgren who retired on June 17th after 28 years as a well-respected Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.
He wrote this scathing attack on the GOP for the truth-out.org website, Sept. 3rd, which is proving to be explosive. He, being on the inside all these years and clearly not a Democrat, shows just how insane the Republican Party has become these days — not that the Democratic Party is in great shape either (they both have clearly lost sight of what they once stood for) but the Republicans, and especially the nutjob Tea Party faction (why aren’t they their own separate political party?) have really lost all touch with reality.
Everyone should read this article...
Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!”
Fred MacMurray: “Yeah — only you’re a little more rotten.”
— Double Indemnity (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporaryAmerica. Both parties are rotten — how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats’ health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats’ rank capitulation to corporate interests — no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. Read the rest of this entry »
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