Lights Out?
I still have a few pages to go, but am impatient to trumpet the virtues of Mike Lofgren's The Party is Over. I have found this book extremely engaging. I accept that I will not get together the grade-A book report I would have liked to produce. In lieu of that, I offer some tantalizing tidbits.
Excerpting from dust-jacket, Lofgren spent twenty-eight years in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees. He worked in succession for John Kasich (R) and then Judd Gregg (R). But rest assured it is highly improbable that there is some dark twin to me at a comparable locale on the other side of the political axis similarly touting this book!
My duties gave me an invaluable perspective on government budgeting, and particularly on budgeting for national security. And they enabled me to understand that when politicians claim they will cut taxes, wage war around the planet, and balance the budget at the same time, they are spouting rank falsehoods.
The subtitle: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
I think I recall Lofgren expressing regret that he was unable to make this a one-party takedown. I don't believe most folks I have a strong sense of political kinship with would have much appetite for a screed like that. My intolerance and disgust for the work left unstarted, the efforts wholly botched, and the ongoing evidence of at least near-criminal ongoing ethical lapses by those with a "D" after their title continues to be a nearly un-swallowable gob. That goes for the Obama administration in spades (so to speak). As Lofgren too-gently phrases it, ". . . a corporate centrist who basically followed (with minor variations) the main policy line of his predecessor." Fortunately the author does not always pull his punches like this.
Although you won't find it in their party platform, the GOP's mission is to protect and further enrich America's plutocracy. The party's caterwauling about deficits and debt is so much eyewash to blind the public.
There are full chapters devoted to the topics of religion and anti-intellectualism as primary underpinnings of the modern republican party. Tremendous stuff.
Never believe any officeholder, Republican or Democrat, who voted for [the Bush tax cuts] or for their extension and claims to be concerned about deficits or debts. The intellectual rationale for the Bush tax cuts as presented by the enormously influential Federal Reserve chairman was precisely to forestall paying off debt. The whole complex theology about tax cuts paying for themselves or boosting the economy is mainly ex post facto rationalization. The groundwork for the present fiscal crisis was established six months before 9/11, although the ritual squawking, mainly Republican, about debt and deficit was mysteriously shelved until after the 2008 elections. Where were the small-government Republicans during the long eight years of the Bush administration, when their revered leader, with control of both the House and Senate, practically doubled the size of the federal government?
If I could maintain the delusion that time does not keep "slipping into the future" (don't remind me, Steve Miller), there would be another upcoming post on the subject of this book. But I hope those of you unafraid of reading and susceptible to suggestion of this sort (you're here for a reason, both meanings operant) are already persuaded to take a tumble. You owe it to yourself to take in the nourishing reinforcement for many of your basic political beliefs that this book offers.
Excerpting from dust-jacket, Lofgren spent twenty-eight years in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees. He worked in succession for John Kasich (R) and then Judd Gregg (R). But rest assured it is highly improbable that there is some dark twin to me at a comparable locale on the other side of the political axis similarly touting this book!
My duties gave me an invaluable perspective on government budgeting, and particularly on budgeting for national security. And they enabled me to understand that when politicians claim they will cut taxes, wage war around the planet, and balance the budget at the same time, they are spouting rank falsehoods.
The subtitle: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
I think I recall Lofgren expressing regret that he was unable to make this a one-party takedown. I don't believe most folks I have a strong sense of political kinship with would have much appetite for a screed like that. My intolerance and disgust for the work left unstarted, the efforts wholly botched, and the ongoing evidence of at least near-criminal ongoing ethical lapses by those with a "D" after their title continues to be a nearly un-swallowable gob. That goes for the Obama administration in spades (so to speak). As Lofgren too-gently phrases it, ". . . a corporate centrist who basically followed (with minor variations) the main policy line of his predecessor." Fortunately the author does not always pull his punches like this.
Although you won't find it in their party platform, the GOP's mission is to protect and further enrich America's plutocracy. The party's caterwauling about deficits and debt is so much eyewash to blind the public.
There are full chapters devoted to the topics of religion and anti-intellectualism as primary underpinnings of the modern republican party. Tremendous stuff.
Never believe any officeholder, Republican or Democrat, who voted for [the Bush tax cuts] or for their extension and claims to be concerned about deficits or debts. The intellectual rationale for the Bush tax cuts as presented by the enormously influential Federal Reserve chairman was precisely to forestall paying off debt. The whole complex theology about tax cuts paying for themselves or boosting the economy is mainly ex post facto rationalization. The groundwork for the present fiscal crisis was established six months before 9/11, although the ritual squawking, mainly Republican, about debt and deficit was mysteriously shelved until after the 2008 elections. Where were the small-government Republicans during the long eight years of the Bush administration, when their revered leader, with control of both the House and Senate, practically doubled the size of the federal government?
If I could maintain the delusion that time does not keep "slipping into the future" (don't remind me, Steve Miller), there would be another upcoming post on the subject of this book. But I hope those of you unafraid of reading and susceptible to suggestion of this sort (you're here for a reason, both meanings operant) are already persuaded to take a tumble. You owe it to yourself to take in the nourishing reinforcement for many of your basic political beliefs that this book offers.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:04 PM
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