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Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult (brace yourselves)
Truth Out ^ | September 3, 2011 | Mike Lofgren

Posted on 09/09/2011 11:05:58 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife

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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

But one can very easily imagine the old Supreme Soviet producing the original Medicare Act, can't one? :)

41 posted on 09/09/2011 11:50:35 AM PDT by Mr. Jeeves ( "The right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended." - Rowan Atkinson)
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To: Irenic

I wonder if he’s related to.......

Rep. Zoe Lofgren [D-CA16]


42 posted on 09/09/2011 11:50:49 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Guys like this are part of the problem.

Go away.


43 posted on 09/09/2011 11:51:54 AM PDT by Vision ("Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?" John 11:40)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Just goes to show what many of us knew in our hearts: The establishment Republicans are not really different from Democrats.
44 posted on 09/09/2011 11:54:28 AM PDT by 5thGenTexan
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

I had opined in the past that we should pay all Congress and Senate say 2 mill a year and let them hire their own staff.
If they want to hire the wife (or husband), no problem.
Supply their own transportation, housing - no benefits, - just the way the ‘Founding Fathers’ wanted it.
Come to the Capitol couple times a year, do your business, go home and go back to work.
They provided for room and board and amnesty while ON THE JOB.
Oh yes, let the states pay their own representatives. Maybe then they would be more careful who they sent to speak for them.

To often if an “R” replaces a “D”, the staff virtually remains the same. Wasn’t it Bob Dole that had the same Liberal Chief of Staff for years?

Like social welfare programs, the ‘job’ has become so lucrative a person would be a fool to leave voluntarily, so they just hang around and vote themselves more goodies.

Wasn’t there a breakdown a few years back that said it took something like 7000 people to ‘support’ the 100 members of the Senate?


45 posted on 09/09/2011 11:55:18 AM PDT by xrmusn ((6/98) If govt involved, the more outlandish a scheme appears, the truer it probably is.)
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To: 5thGenTexan
Just goes to show what many of us knew in our hearts: The establishment Republicans are not really different from Democrats.

And you got that from this article? You read what he said about conservatives and you are ready to climb on his bandwagon? You better look at the sign on the wagon his driving.

46 posted on 09/09/2011 11:57:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: hinckley buzzard

“It is obvious that Mike Lofgren has had a sudden infatuation with a liberal homosexual lover.”

This is my suspicion as well. The article is nothing more than the usual compendium of the usual leftist fictions and smears. Nowhere in the piece is there anything that resembles serious analysis.

If nothing else, the piece illustrates how the Rs allow themselves to be subverted. The writer didn’t just have a psychotic moment and then disintegrate into the person who wrote this article. He surely has been like this for a very long time, and somehow the Rs don’t seem to understand that people like this are subverting their policies and giving them bad advice.

Another interesting part of the rant is the effort to promote one of the newer liberal sneer/smears: conservatives as “low information” voters.

Apart from their sheer viciousness, leftists obviously have profound ego needs borne out of a dim awareness that their worldview is false. The nearly hysterical rhetoric of the left is an anodyne: Lofgren is struggling to avoid watching what Herbert Spencer called “The Tragedy of the Murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Brutal Gang of Facts” - a drama in which the left’s worldview is cast in the leading role of The Beautiful Theory.

Yes, based on the “hissy fit” quality of the author’s writing, my conjecture is that we are witnessing the middle-life crisis of a sodomite. The Rs that gave him various staff positions should be “outed” and shamed.


47 posted on 09/09/2011 11:59:41 AM PDT by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
There is not the slightest chance that this person was ever a true, voting Republican, much less a conservative. As he uniformly quotes sources and makes claims that militate entirely in the direction of Progressive liberalism, it is not beyond reason to question whether his previous employment was the political equivalent of a "false flag" operation, or alternatively, whether the author underwent a dramatic conversion on the road to Wherever he now stakes his tent.

Regardless, there is so much arrant nonsense in this piece that it would take an essay of equal length (or longer) to address all of it. One example though: the claim about small businesses being a tiny fraction of high-wage earners is particularly telling, only in part because it is demonstrably false.

The telling part is that it comes from a hard-left source (and is commonly repeated on the left-wing blogosphere) and because it is arrived at so dishonestly: by counting as "small businesses" anyone who files a 1099 income form. If you sell a used item for a profit on Ebay, that means you. Congratulations: you're now a "small business", for the purposes of this (dishonest) argument, and lumped in with those who struggle with both taxes and and stunning regulatory burdens every day, only to be told by the likes of our author that they don't pay enough.

48 posted on 09/09/2011 12:03:17 PM PDT by andy58-in-nh (America does not need to be organized: it needs to be liberated.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
I think you misunderstand me. He was a "Republican" but sounds like he holds the same contempt for we Conservatives as a Democrat. He is not Conservative. He is a staffer that I bet Rove would be proud of.

I am not on his bandwagon at all - he simply reinforces that the establishment needs a good cleaning on the Republican side.

49 posted on 09/09/2011 12:03:47 PM PDT by 5thGenTexan
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To: All

A fan among many Mike Lofgren fans:

Thank you Mike Lofgren for giving us that very much needed “No Shit Sherlock!” moment.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_09/mike_lofgren_leaves_the_cult031989.php


50 posted on 09/09/2011 12:05:35 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: 5thGenTexan

Perhaps my reading of your comment was due to the frequent and cavalier way “RINO” has been tossed around lately.

I think the Left is delighted in the fights.


51 posted on 09/09/2011 12:09:31 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Just another snivelling progressive socialist, is he in for a surprise!!

Be Ever Vigilant!!


52 posted on 09/09/2011 12:10:02 PM PDT by blackie (Be Well~Be Armed~Be Safe~Molon Labe!)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Wow, there is no hope for the Republic if this dips**t is representative of common D.C. vermin.


53 posted on 09/09/2011 12:10:04 PM PDT by Dr.Zoidberg (Warning: Sarcasm/humor is always engaged. Failure to recognize this may lead to misunderstandings.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

It is no wonder that our country is being destroyed from within, I suspect that the DC staff is filled to the gills with arrogant sacks of cr@p like this punk.


54 posted on 09/09/2011 12:14:05 PM PDT by zzeeman ("We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.")
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To: andy58-in-nh; All

Someone responds to another thread where this screed is posted:

Dave Nalle on September 08, 2011 2:25 AM:

As someone from the political right and active politically in the Republican Party it’s almost surreal to read the comments on this article. The portrait they paint of the Republican Party as seen through the eyes of the political left is very different from the reality of the party as seen from within - and seen from a clearer perspective than Lofgren’s evident tunnelvision.

The Republican Party is nowhere near as unified or homogeneous and most here seem to assume. It is a very diverse party with powerful internal struggles and factions which barely manage to work together. In particular the perception of the tea parties and the forces of “conservative” resurgence we have seen in the last 3 years are being critically misunderstood.

The newly politically engaged elements in the party are not part of the Bush-Gingrich-Rove-Cheney-Boehner party establishment and they do not support them. The party insiders and movement conservatives like the Neocons are as much an enemy of grassroots Republicans as the leading Democrats and President Obama.

Although establishment forces are trying to corrupt and coopt it, the Tea Party is not a movement in support of old Republican strategies and isn’t interested in increasing party power. It wants to overthrow the GOP leadership and reclaim the party and the government for a populist conservatism which would likely be easier for Democrats to work with than the current power-politics elite which runs the Party.

The same corrupt powerbrokers against whom Lofgren is reacting are among the main enemies of young Republican activists and disgruntled older Tea Partiers who feel that their own party has deeply betrayed them. This is not an overnight development. It took a long time to come to a head. It goes back to a deep dissatisfaction with the failures and bad intentions of the Bush administration which behaved in what is perceived as a very un-Republican way - arrogant and unresponsive and irresponsible.

Just as the GOP isn’t unified, neither is the Tea Party. It’s a diverse movement which has a lot of internal problems. Perhaps a third of the members are indeed “crazies” as the political left and many on the right would define them. They’re obsessed with high intensity but largely irrelevant issues, conspiracies and fantasies. Another third are long-time party members who just think the party has gone off the rails and are angry about the economy and the job situation and the failures of party leadership. The other third are the libertarian Republicans who are often younger and new to political activism, very volatile and extremely hostile to the party establishment.

These groups don’t agree on much, but they do agree that the party needs to be reformed, that the leadership has failed the members, and that fiscal reform should be the absolute first priority of the party if they can get any kind of control. Yes, they want to take control of the government away from Obama and the Democrats, but they certainly don’t want to give that power to the GOP establishment who they see as indistinguishable from the Democrats.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the media, for all their laziness and incompetence, is to convince the political left that the Tea Party is a raving, bigoted mob bent on their destruction. That’s far from the truth. Polls show that the Tea Party movement has a substantial component of Democrats (about 15%) and an even larger component of moderate independents. Yet the media coined the term “teabaggers” and directed the ire of the left at a group which could be their natural allies against the Neocons and the political establishment.

It’s a classic example of divide and conquer. Before the unhappy progresives and the angry Tea Partiers could find common ground against the elite class which rules both parties, they turned them against each other, making sure that they could never make common cause against their real enemies at the top of both parties. This protected the big government bureaucracy, monopolistic unions, corporate welfare recipients and military industrial complex which finance and own the political establishments in both parties and which should be the natural enemy of grassroots voters in both parties.

The comments here show how badly the left has been duped, as you lash out at the Tea Party as if it is a tool of the establishment, just the way the media and your own exploitative leaders want you to.

Dave Nalle
Republican Liberty Caucus
http://www.rlc.org

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_09/mike_lofgren_leaves_the_cult031989.php


55 posted on 09/09/2011 12:14:53 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: hinckley buzzard
this buffoon has sucked down a whole cafeteria full of 'rat talking points.

Published in none other than Truth Out!

56 posted on 09/09/2011 12:16:01 PM PDT by Ole Okie (!!)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife; Liz
This article is getting a lot of play on liberal emails.

Who is Lofgren? I googled him, and he was a staffer, but no info on who he worked for. This "thirty-year GOP staffer" seems to have been a total nonentity.

The news source was one I posted about recently as being yet another Soros-funded "non profit."

57 posted on 09/09/2011 12:20:49 PM PDT by Mamzelle
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Yep. Rush has talked much about entrenched staffers. They’ve been around throug many adminstrations...and as we can see from the above example, whole they have an R in front of their office, they are left and more left. This is the buzsaw that Sarah Palin rn into during her campaign as Veep, all those wonderful ‘staffers’ willing to help. Same for newly-electyed. If they can’t be trusted, clear all of them out, let’s start fresh. Glad this clown is gone...and glad he wrote what he wrote. Now everyone can see it.


58 posted on 09/09/2011 12:22:56 PM PDT by SueRae (I can see November 2012 from my HOUSE!!!!!!!!)
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To: MNJohnnie
Wow! Did you ever nail it!

Anyone who has a chance to visit DC should make it a point to visit their congress critter's office (or anyone who will see them) and chat up the staff.

There are a relative handful of senior people who are loyal. The rest flow from office to office like fleas on a dog. They are not all bad people, but they overwhelmingly fit this profile:

  1. Very liberal, overwhelmingly from Ivy League colleges or a tier or two below these elitist institutions.
  2. Rich parents or at least those who can afford to subsidize their meager salaries in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Otherwise, they are living 6 to 8 to a convenience size flat somewhere along the green line.
  3. Star-struck. If their parents aren't rich (and even if they are)-- very dedicated to the perks and trappings of political power and the offices to which it is attached.
  4. Regional-- overwhelmingly from the northeast and mid Atlantic states. Most of the congress people claim they like to hire staff from their own state or district, but the truth of the matter is that few can do so due to the pool of applicants which I just described. The further away from DC you get, the more true this is.
  5. Ambitious-- Each has ambitions of getting promoted to one of the few senior staff positions available. This, quite frankly, doesn't happen very often if the congress critter is smart enough to get re-elected consistently-- they will bring in a long-time friend or associate whom the can trust instead. Of course, they won't tell them that because they want their staff performing and reaching constantly for the elusive high hanging fruit.

59 posted on 09/09/2011 12:25:17 PM PDT by Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The problem is close to 100% of the Congressional staffers for all parties in DC are people who believe in centralized government. They have made it their life's work by definition.

That belief is so pervasive, it has the power to corrupt even well-intentioned politicians who go there with a desire to change it.

Power Corrupts.

That's why I am for repealing the 17th Amendment - Senate appointment was Jefferson's attempt to create an outside of Washington balancing force by using the State government's lust for power as a check against the Federal government's lust.

60 posted on 09/09/2011 12:32:02 PM PDT by 5thGenTexan
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