Time to reprise Mike Lofgren's article on why he quit a long career as a GOP congressional staffer
Given Romney's dedication to the use of the Big Lie in his campaign against rational, democratic government - I thought it was a good time to re-post the article written by Mike Lofgren on his decision to bow out of a career (of nearly 30 yrs) as a Republican Congressional staffer. He doesn't mince words in his appraisal of what the GOP has morphed into.
Some may have missed it when this was initially published Sept 2011 so, for your examination.....
(emphases my own)
http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult
[font size="+1"]To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.[/font] To be sure, 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 [font size="+1"] 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.[/font]
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
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[font size="+1"] 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, [font color="red"]or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe [/font]. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.[/font]
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= new reply since forum marked as read
