WILLIAM HARWOOD
“This meeting of the Republican Election Strategy Committee will now come to order. First order of business: How do we win back a majority in Congress when the Democratic president keeps putting forth legislation that even Republican voters recognize as good for America?”
“That’s easy. We don’t let his proposals pass.”
“Really? And how do we stop them, when the Democrats have a majority in both houses?”
“Simple. We don’t let any Obama proposal come to a yes-no vote that he could conceivably win.”
“Are you saying we should filibuster everything, so that no proposal by the Democrats is ever allowed to pass? And how do we justify such a tactic come election time?”
“We won’t have to justify it. Keep in mind that these are the same mental catamites that grabbed their ankles and let it happen when the Supreme Court overthrew the Constitution in order to appoint the loser of the 2000 election President. We campaign on the premise that having Obama in charge was like having no Congress at all. It was his watch, and he brought us to the brink of a new Great Depression. So throw him out and elect a Republican majority that will fix the economy, instead of sitting on its collective arse as the Democrats have done.”
“The economy is the big issue, certainly. But how do we respond when the Democrats point out that Bush transformed Clinton’s budget surplus into a trillion-dollar deficit, and brought on the recession with his tax cuts for the super-rich?”
“No problem. When the Democrats argue that it was Bush who screwed the economy in the first place, we smirk and say something like, ‘If it was Bush’s fault, why hasn’t Obama fixed it? He’s had plenty of time.’ We blame Obama for everything.”
“What about the accusation that the Democratic majority in Congress couldn’t achieve anything because Republican filibusters prevented their legislation from being voted on? How do we answer that?”
“We won’t have to. We keep repeating over and over that the Democrats did nothing, and if they retain their majorities they’ll go on doing nothing.”
“What do we say about the arguments that got Obama elected in the first place? Rolling Stone called Bush the worst president America has ever had, and polls indicate that a high percentage agree.”
“We find a spokesperson to call Obama the worst president America has ever had. Maybe that idiot Dan Quayle can be conned into saying something of the sort? Or if not him, then his son, who is currently a senatorial candidate?”
“And what of the widespread comparisons of Gee Duyba with Hitler, who similarly started a war of personal aggrandizement?”
“We find a few lunatic fringers willing to compare Obama with Hitler. In a nation full of Becks, Limbaughs, and Palins, fruitcakes willing to parrot whatever guano we spill onto the floor of their cages shouldn’t be hard to find. And we don’t openly endorse their verbal diarrhea. We simply ignore it—after making sure it gets the maximum possible coverage.”
“In other words we lie?”
“Not just lie. The Big Lie. Repeated over and over, a Big Lie becomes truth, at least in the minds of the mindless masses. It was the Willie Horton lie that got Dukakis beaten by Daddy Bush. It was Junior Bush’s Big Lie that he was not a liar that enabled him to beat John McCain for the Republican nomination in 2000, and the Supreme Court’s Big Lie that a recount would not change the result that enabled them to appoint their own party-liner president. The Big Lie has always worked for the Republican Party, and the Big Lie that Obama’s refusal to compromise was the reason his proposals failed will work this time.”
“And what if his proposals for universal health care and extension of unemployment benefits manage to get passed? What do we do then?”
“No problem. We redefine everything he does so that it comes out as a disaster. We call health care, ‘Obamacare,’ and compare it with the health care systems in Canada and Europe.”
“But those systems work fine.”
“The masses don’t know that. We tell them that Canadians with serious health problems have to come to America for treatment, and find an example of a single Canadian who did so, and we can convince the great unwashed that the ninety-nine percent of Canadians for whom the system works don’t count. Health care for everyone is un-American. Same with unemployment benefits. We claim that the unemployed are lazy bums who refuse to work, and call feeding them ‘socialism’ which we compare with Stalin’s Soviet Socialist Republic and Hitler’s National Socialist Party.”
“Hitler fed the unemployed, so feeding the unemployed must be a bad thing?”
“Precisely. But we can take a lesson from a different Hitler policy. He came to power by giving the Germans someone to hate. We give conservatives someone to hate, by goading Democrats into supporting liberal causes such as a woman’s right to choose abortions, atheists’ right to equality under the law, the right of gays to marry members of their own sex, and the right of Muslims, whom we equate with terrorists, to practice their religion under the noses of god-fearing Christians. We even find some Manchurian Candidates willing to accuse Obama of being a Muslim. And when the media ask if we personally believe he’s a Muslim, we don’t mention that he’s as godphuqt a Christian as any Republicanazi. Instead, we answer that we are willing to take his word that he is not, as if his word is the only evidence there is. As a political strategy, hate works. Try it and see.”
Will the combination of the Big Lie and organized hate work? Will the Party of No successfully lie itself into a majority in the House of Representatives in 2010? If it does, the brain amputees who let it happen will have no one to blame but themselves. And they can be very sure that, having been rewarded for lying, the Big Liars will use the same strategy to regain the Senate and the Presidency in 2012. America could find itself looking back on the theofascist tyranny of Bush Junior, when even mainstream Republicans viewed extremists like Faux News, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party as raving mad dogs, as the good old days.
The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, Mike Lofgren, 2012, Viking Penguin, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, ISBN 978-0-670-02626-5, 240 pp, hc, $25.95, reviewed by William Harwood.
“How did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer” (front jacket). In fact Mike Lofgren performs a public service just by asking the question that TV commentators go to gymnastic lengths to avoid. After weeks of rationalizations by both sides about why Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama, I have yet to hear anyone state the reality that a majority of voters recognized him as a compulsive, pathological, serial liar whose only consistent policy was to do to America what Al Capone did to Chicago and priests do to altar boys. In a book published three months before Obama’s victory, Lofgren was not so pretentious as to assume that his expectation of the result could not be wrong. But his belief that polls predicting an Obama win were accurate turned out to be justified.
Lofgren is highly qualified to explain why the Republican Party is intentionally screwing America in order to provide a free ride for the superrich, so that the superrich will continue to bribe them with campaign contributions; and why the Democratic Party’s recognition that their own glass house is not shatterproof makes them overly circumspect in denouncing the Republicans. Lofgren has twenty-eight years’ experience as a professional staffer with congressional budget committees. He states (pp. 2-3) that his experience, “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. . . . I suspect many of these politicians never believed what they were saying but were cynically playing to an increasingly deranged political base that does believe it.”
He asks, “Do Democrats offer a sane alternative?” and declares that, “the answer is, finally, no. . . . Democrats who expect this book to be a diatribe against Republicans alone will be disappointed. The GOP had gone off the rails. . . . But its sorry situation is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction in American politics and society for which Democrats own a considerable share of the responsibility.”
Lofgren has considerable qualifications for analyzing the problems. Unfortunately, he also has a significant disqualification. He recognizes (pp. 128-132) that, “Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file.” But, “even when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax . . . I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln. . . . The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency. . . . the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are supposed to have outgrown. . . . How quickly one forgets one’s own moral lapses when one can consider the manifold harms inflicted on our nation by godless leftist!”
Lofgren’s disqualification as a solver of the problems created by the godphuqt is that he is godphuqt himself. He confesses (p. 136) that, “I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid.” He argues that being Catholic or Mormon should not be a disqualification for a President of the United States, because he fails to comprehend that being a godworshipper should be a disqualification for a President of the United States. How could a president empathize with the Founding Fathers’ determination not to allow America to become the kind of totalitarian theocracy they had left behind, if he himself shares the theocrats’ belief that right and wrong are whatever the most sadistic, evil, mass-murdering psychopath in all fiction, a sky Führer named God whose only redeeming social value is that he/ she/ it does not existent, says they are?
Imagine a Chinese economist describing how Communist Party hierarchs were screwing the country’s economy, and advocating a pragmatic interpretation of communist dogma, while adhering faithfully to the party line that the problem was other people’s misinterpretations of Marx’s Revealed Truth rather than communism itself. That is essentially what Lofgren is trying to do. Even though the god delusion has been the cause of ninety percent of all manmade evil for more than 3,000 years, he thinks he can counteract the evil that Republican religiosity is inflicting on America without curing its victims of the delusion that is itself the root of all evil. Good luck with that.
Lofgren is convinced that not all Christians are stupid. But he does not grasp that all Christians are by definition uneducated, since the evidence falsifying religion is no further away than the nearest university library. He knows that his bible endorses a 6000-years old universe, and that it asserts that all species were created at the same time rather than evolving from common ancestors. But does he know that it also states in fourteen places that the earth is flat? I doubt it. As Isaac Asimov pointed out, the Christian bible, when properly read, is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. The best advice I can give Lofgren, or any godworshipper, is read the bible! Even a person who prays every day has a good chance of being cured if he ever learns what his bible really says.
Lofgren cites Republican opposition to contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage, but does not mention that laws prohibiting such acts are laws respecting an establishment of religion. If he raised that inconvenient reality, he would be forced to acknowledge that many laws he endorses are also laws respecting an establishment of religion. But he does draw attention (p. 66) to the parallel between “public statutes on abortion in the Commonwealth of Virginia” and “sharia law.” And he recognizes (p. 10) that, “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital core today: Eric Cantor, Steve King, Michele Bachman. . . . The Congressional Directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. . . . The Republican Speaker of the House . . . does not issue orders to them; he takes orders from them.”
He quotes Bill Moyers (p. 19), “John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out the cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it.” That makes Moyers and Lofgren the first commentators I have encountered with the intestinal fortitude to accuse Republican politicians of bribing the superrich in exchange for a quid pro quo. Yet despite having seen the same news broadcasts that caused me to question whether Boehner could pass Logic 101, Lofgren refuses to raise the issue of whether a propagandist who projects onto his opponent the precise inadequacies and intransigence he sees in the mirror is a liar or a madman.
As long ago as 1922 Woodrow Wilson told an interviewer (p. 145), “Of course, like every man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.” But ninety years later, “Whether it is Michele Bachmann announcing that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation, or Senator James Inhofe condemning the findings of climate scientists as a ‘hoax’, or Rick Santorum doubting the validity of evolutionary biology, there can be no question that the GOP [God’s Own Party] has placed itself squarely in the camp of the flat-earthers.” That paragraph explains Wikipedia’s surmise that Lofgren, a long-time “Republican insider,” is now “probably an independent.”
In his chapter, “Are The Democrats Any Better?” Lofgren reports (pp. 198-199) that, “Obama has stabilized the plutocracy he promised to reform,” that, “The DOD budget grew more under Obama than it had been projected to grow by the Bush administration,” and, “The main thrust of the establishment’s policies will be implemented regardless of who wins [the 2012 election].” As a non-American supporter of the Democratic Party, perhaps the most significant observation I can make is that I found nothing in the chapter with which to disagree. But it disappointed me, to put it mildly, that despite Lofgren’s recognition of “How Religion Destroyed My Party,” he made no mention of Obama’s increase in taxpayer funding for “faith based initiatives,” in blatant violation of the First Amendment.
While the Democrats must share the responsibility for not solving the problem of a do-nothing Congress willing to screw the American people for personal benefit, the big difference between a Democrat and a Republican is that, in order to win a Democratic primary, it is not necessary to be dangerously, incurably, certifiably insane.
I seriously doubt that any Democrat, liberal, or MSNBC viewer will find anything in The Party Is Over that he did not already know. And no Republican or Faux News addict who starts to read it is likely to get past the Introduction. So was Lofgren wasting his time in writing it? In the short term, probably yes. But facts do tend to reach the masses eventually (or I would not have bothered writing a book disproving religion). For all of its inadequacy in refusing to recognize the continued existence of religion as America’s and the human race’s paramount problem, Lofgren’s book has much to say—to the next generation.