Mike Lofgren
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" (2016) and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted" (2013).
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, January 14, 2021 A Layman’s Guide to Spotting Sedition, Treason, and Lunacy in General Now that America and the world have seen what the phrase " concerned citizens " means in the context of political action, it may be necessary to learn how to decode other politically charged phrases in these fraught and fateful times. You have probably heard the following statements on more than... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 29, 2020 Hey, America, You Want a True Conservative Party? I used to be cautious about making predictions. This is partly because history is a complex, open system and predictions almost always come to grief in some important detail. It is also hard to take seriously the Chris Matthews school of punditry: make a series of wild predictions. Supposedly,... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, November 25, 2020 Trump Was No Fluke: George W. Bush Blazed the Trail My friend and former colleague Bruce Bartlett has done a service by reminding us that after four years of the non-stop catastrophe that was the Trump administration, we should not lull ourselves with the illusion that the 45 th president was some aberration that fell out of the sky. His flamboyant... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, October 27, 2020 Should Trump Be Held Accountable? A Harvard Academic Says No In today’s hyper-polarized America, one is used to encountering political argumentation that causes either outrage or eyerolling. Mostly, this is the work of partisan operatives, and easily discounted. Occasionally, though, one comes across opinions that are ostensibly above the fray and written by... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, October 21, 2020 Damnatio Memoriae: The First Step to Recovery in a Post-Trump America “After Domitian’s death the senate appointed Nerva to rule and it condemned Domitian’s memory (damnatio memoriae)”—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. III In a previous piece , I proposed ways in which Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden could limit the sabotage and... Read more |
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Views Monday, October 12, 2020 A Modest Proposal to Prevent Sabotage by the Trump Regime For complex historical reasons, Federal employees don’t get much love. Republicans already had begun their war on expertise nearly 90 years ago, when they condemned the New Deal for being run by distant bureaucrats. Joseph McCarthy made a career accusing those bureaucrats of being Soviet spies... Read more |
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Views Friday, September 25, 2020 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Peril of America's Aging Elite “The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have said. Despite the mordant wisdom most of us see in that statement, an alarming number of people refuse to follow his implicit advice. Many of us, particularly in America, the land of rugged individualism, see... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 17, 2020 Trump Supports the Troops, Alright! Since the campus anti-Vietnam war disturbances of the 1960s and 70s, Republicans have pretty much owned the whole patriotic magilla, including support of our troops. In the last four years, that reputation has come in for a few lumps, what with a Republican president calling American war dead... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 10, 2020 Is Trump a Murderer? A consistent rule of the Trump presidency is that no matter the subject, the retrospective evidence will demonstrate that Donald Trump’s actions, and those of his appointees, were more twisted and criminal than the previous speculations of his bitterest critics. This phenomenon may spring from what... Read more |
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Views Saturday, August 22, 2020 A Commission to Investigate Presidential Crimes is a Terrible Idea On August 15, Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California proposed , through the medium of (what else?) Twitter, that after the election a “Presidential Crimes Commission” should be created to investigate the manifold derelictions of Donald J. Trump, including “[s]abotaging the mail to... Read more |