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" and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, January 22, 2019 Is Pence as Unfit for Office as Trump? In the last two years, the press has spilled a Niagara of ink to describe President Donald Trump’s lies, flipflops, personal weirdness, and sheer unsuitability for office. As for Vice President Michael Richard Pence, despite his hectoring insistence on being the chosen instrument of the Almighty,... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 07, 2019 Extraordinary Popular Delusions In a previous column , I described how the Republican Party’s Bad Ideas-Industrial Complex churns out an endless stream of pernicious policy ideas. But that invites a question: how did these ideas get so much traction among ordinary Americans who are being harmed by them? As Kurt Andersen... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 27, 2018 The Party of Ideas I recently attended a conference at the Niskanen Center. It was a think tank gabfest at which the participants were disillusioned conservatives hoping to chart a course toward a saner political center-right. Jonathan Chait did a near-ecstatic write-up of the meeting and its promise of a... Read more |
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Views Monday, December 17, 2018 The End of Rolling Thunder? We Can Only Hope So! The news media inform us that Rolling Thunder (always described in the press as a veterans’ advocacy group or some other such positive term) will run its final annual Memorial Day weekend motorcycle rally in Washington, D.C., in 2019. The organizers reportedly do not have the money to pay for... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 11, 2018 The Bad Ideas-Industrial Complex One of the integral components of Beltway ecology, along with the Pentagon, intelligence spooks, contractors, and lobbyists, is the think tank. Whether it’s called a foundation, an institute or a trust, it’s not only as important as the other big players, it synergizes with them and cements their... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 27, 2018 'In Front of Your Nose'—A Sequel to Orwell in the Trump Era In 1946, George Orwell wrote a piece about the unfortunate human habit of failing or refusing to see what plainly lay before one’s face. Whether through conscious mendacity, or intellectual laziness, or the universal tendency to euphemism, or because facing the truth would be too personally... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 13, 2018 Nazis May Be Bad, But Tax Cuts Are Awesome! In the wake of Bob Woodward’s latest bombshell book and the publication of an anonymous op-ed by a purported senior member of the Trump administration claiming to be resisting the president’s agenda, the press and the blogosphere have erupted in one of America’s periodic moral fits about civic duty... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 05, 2018 Neoconservative Comeback? They Never Left Just as with entomology or botany, foreign policy analysis is largely an exercise in taxonomy: is some politician a realist or an idealist, a liberal internationalist or a national-interest proponent, an interventionist or an isolationist? Although thinking in categorical terms is a convenient way... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 09, 2018 A Buckeye’s Lament: What Has Happened to Ohio and the Midwest? By now, you’ve almost certainly seen the photo taken at a Trump political rally in central Ohio, my native state. It has sparked a lot of comment , the substance of which suggests that even for journalists and pundits, it is no longer easy to sustain the firewall between judgments about Donald... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 02, 2018 C’mon, Just Say It! According to an Annenberg survey, only a quarter of Americans can correctly name the three branches of the federal government . Is that sad fact, like the weather, something that just happens, beyond anyone’s control? Or does something make Americans resistant to the most elementary information?... Read more |