Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)

According to Mike Lofgren, a former GOP 30-year-staff memeber on Capitol Hell--oops, "HILL"--who left the Republican Party:  
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, according to Lofgren, the two parties are NOT rotten in quite the same way.  To be sure, he adds the Democrats have their share of  " machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP."

Until the recent "tragi-comedy" debt-crisis debate, many Americans, who never paid much attention to politics, suddenly started paying more attention.  It had to come as a shock to many of them, says Lofgren, that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.

As Lofgren acutely observes:

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.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

Who always has the upper hand in a hostage situation--the terrorist hostage takers or the party trying to negotiate the release of the hostages?  Obviously, it is the terrorists because they do not care about the fate of the people they hold hostage while the party trying to negotiate their release actually does care about their lives.

The press and political pundits should see this analogy clearly, because it is so obvious.  Yet, they have been as confused and have been as misled as many of the citizens.  They, like the American people, are being manipulated.
"It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult,  says the former GOP staff member, "or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant."

The only thing that keeps Congress functioning is "collegiality and good faith."  It has been, in times past, a highly-functioning, productive institution.  Filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive.  Can one even imagine getting the original Medicare passed today?

That would be about as likely as the old Soviet Union passing a Bill of Rights.

Now, virtually every bill, every Senate confirmation, every judicial appointment has become the subject of a Republican filibuster.

"Is it any wonder that Washington is deadlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic."

As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

Do not be fooled into thinking that all this was accidental or a natural outgrowth of the economy.  Lofgren candidly states that a couple of years ago a Republican staffer told him candidly  (and proudly) exactly what the GOP's motive behind all its obstruction and disruption was:
"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."

Furthermore, Lofgren adds, "This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980)."

Think of the tens of millions of people in America who hardly know which Party controls which branch of government, much less are astute enough to see through such subterfuge.

 They hear just enough to develop the attitude that ""they are all crooks,"and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard."

(To Be Continued)

https://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

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