Obama's Speech and Jobs Plan Don't Go Far Enough

GOP Defector Spills the Beans

Mike Lofgren loyally served the GOP on Capitol Hill for 28 years. But no longer

Many people are buzzing about an article at truthout.org by one Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican staff aide on Capitol Hill who just couldn’t take the crazy anymore, left his job, and produced this buzzy (and quite well-written) lamentation about his party’s tactics and goals. If you haven’t read it, you must. There was nothing in there that surprised me. I’ve been saying all these things for a long time (as have many others). What continues to dumbfound me is why Lofgren’s assertions are even controversial, because as long as they remain so, “neutral” observers who deny this reality bear some responsibility for the sad shape our politics is in.

• The debt-ceiling debate was an act of “political terrorism,” in which the GOP concocted a crisis and used it to ensure that the party's unprecedented demands were met. He writes: “Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.”

• The August FAA reauthorization fight was another instance such of hostage-taking: “Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers, and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel—how prudent is that?—in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”

• The GOP plan to discredit government in the people’s eyes is very conscious: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”

• As for belief as opposed to tactics, the party basically really cares only about the rich. Actually, Lofgren doesn’t say “basically.” He says “solely and exclusively.” And he explains how they’ve camouflaged this with talk of protecting small businesses and so on.

There is much, much more. He’s not very happy either about his party’s militarism, its cynical use of religion, its total opposition to doing anything about the environment, and other matters, but most especially its neo-Leninist posture in which political power trumps everything.

When Lofgren first started working on the Hill, in 1983, the House and Senate were still full of moderate Republicans—and even Reagan himself was a quisling by today’s standards.

vigilant rationalism of CO 6:56PM September 10, 2011