Free Republic

Mike Lofgren used to be a Republican. Then he “retired” last year – so he claims – from a staff job on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee doing grunt work for GOP lawmakers. Nowadays, Lofgren gets paid to bash the party of Lincoln (and Reagan), which has been taken over by the “religious right,” he laments, in his just-published, oh-so-cleverly-titled book, “The Party is Over.” “Religious cranks ceased to be a minor political nuisance in this country in the 1970s,” writes Lofgren, “and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file.” Today, he reckons, these “religious fundamentalists”...

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 contemporary America. 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...

The Internets are buzzing about Mike Lofgren's takedown of the Republican Party published by Truthout, the left-wing rabble-rousing website. The news here is not that Truthout doesn't like Republicans; it's that Mike Lofgren is a Republican who worked for 28 years as a legislative aide to various GOP members of Congress. So it would be fair to say that he knows what he's talking about. What he's talking about is not exactly new, but it is a succinct (despite its length) statement of what has happened to the Republicans, why it happened and how the Democrats - or indeed, patriotic...