Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mike Lofgren Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 38 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mike Lofgren.

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Famous Quotes By Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 1711570

Between 1994 and 2008, an individual health-care mandate was a standard GOP nostrum, promoted not only by Mitt Romney, but by Newt Gingrich when he was the highest elected Republican official in the country, and it was endorsed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Now the mandate is the work of the devil, and authoritarian followers of the GOP, like faithful party members in Orwell's 1984, believe "we've always been at war" against mandates. — Mike Lofgren

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...More to the point, do their representatives and senators in Washington deliberately prioritize the stated requirement of the Pentagon and CIA above the most basic need of their constituents? Yes, if those legislators have developed the unfortunate tendency to go into a trance every time someone utter the magic phrase "national security." In truth, it happen often enough, and many times of the course of my career I saw Congress respond to that occult incantation like iron filing drawn to a magnet. p 64 — Mike Lofgren

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Ever since it formed, the Tea Party has struck me as a kind of weird generational echo, forty years on, of the young leftists of the late 1960s. The 1960s leftists, like the Tea Party now, had unrealistic goals and were hostile to compromise. Both saw themselves as cultural forces up against a shadowy establishment. Both treated politics as street theater and had a curious fondness for using violent rhetoric and making apocalyptic pronouncements. Generationally speaking, the 1960s Left and the Right of today are the same group... p. 232 — Mike Lofgren

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The pressure to conform to an authority figure or peer group can cause people to behave in shocking ways. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 310533

The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260 — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 2105339

But the larger objective, beyond specific policies, is to blanket the American public with a message of fear. As long as we are fearful, as long as there is an endless list of threats, Pentagon spending can never be cut, PATRIOT Act provisions can never be repealed, and the United States will forever have the right and duty to meddle in every corner of the world. — Mike Lofgren

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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. — Mike Lofgren

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A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC), with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or so he claimed - which, — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 1296059

Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." U.S. corporations have recently had their most profitable quarters in history; at the end of 2011, Apple was sitting on $97.6 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most small countries. So where are the jobs? Overwhelmingly, they went to China.4 Another — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 1128597

The George W. Bush administration trotted out all manner of excuses for its invasion of Iraq, but it was clearly mindful of the fact that Saddam Hussein's decision in 2000 to denominate the country's oil sales in euros rather than dollars could hardly set a good precedent. Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill revealed in his 'as told to' memoir that finding a way to forcibly get rid of Saddam was topic A at the Bush administration's very first National Security Council meeting, a mere ten days after Bush's inauguration. — Mike Lofgren

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In effect, sanctions take another country's civilian population hostage in order to get its leaders to acquiesce. — Mike Lofgren

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The twin shocks of 9/11 and the Great Recession seem mentally to have unhinged a portion of the American people and much of the political class. The following years were consumed by crazy arguments about the president's birth certificate, death panels, and voters shouting that the government must get its hands off their government-provided Medicare. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 1539724

The contemporary populist Right is a bastard child of corporate America, which has subsidized the Tea Party via front groups like American for Prosperity and the Club for Growth ever since the movement's beginning on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Its real, as opposed to stated, purpose was to distract and channel the inchoate popular longing for a change in the status quo... p 234 — Mike Lofgren

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study by the Bertelsmann Foundation concluded that in measures of economic equality, social mobility, and poverty prevention, the United States ranks twenty-seventh out of the thirty-one advanced industrial nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 1634407

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? — Mike Lofgren

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A public that pays more attention to reality TV than its status as free citizens cannot withstand an unremitting encroachment on its liberties by calculating, unscrupulous, and power-hungry leaders. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 1697778

Every time General David Petraeus appeared before a congressional committee, whether to testify about Iraq or Afghanistan or to be confirmed as CIA director, the hearings were largely a waste of time. Members of Congress burned through large segments of their time-limited question periods by tossing verbal kisses to the witness and going on about what a patriot Petraeus was. There was little time to ask serious questions about the strategy of our trillion-dollar military engagement in the Muslim world and to explore alternatives. The fawning of military cheerleaders such as Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham reached such extravagant lengths as would have made Caesar blush. — Mike Lofgren

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I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State...a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections — Mike Lofgren

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Let's face it: The Republican Party is no longer a broad-based conservative party in the historically accepted sense. It is an oligarchy with a well-developed public relations strategy designed to soothe and anesthetize its followers with appeals to tradition, security, and family even as it pursues a radical agenda that would transform the country into a Dickensian corporatocracy at home and a belligerent military empire abroad. — Mike Lofgren

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A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. 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. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 2109384

Its belief in polarizing language and tactics, a militant and militarized foreign policy, and a constant search for mortal enemies, foreign and domestic alike, qualifies the current GOP as a radical right-wing party, not a conservative one. — Mike Lofgren

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It is no coincidence that as the Supreme Court has been removing the last constraints on the legalized corruption of politicians, the American standard of living has been falling at the fastest rate in decades. — Mike Lofgren

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Capturing the terms of the debate through the adroit use of language has allowed the GOP to bamboozle millions of people about their own material interests. — Mike Lofgren

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The state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, — Mike Lofgren

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A politician is a hog grateful to whoever is rattling the stick inside the swill bucket. It is time to take the swill bucket away. p 270 — Mike Lofgren

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[I]f the public wants the military to perform better, give more prudent advice to its civilian leadership, and spend taxpayer money more wisely, it must elect a Congress that will dial down a few notches its habitual and childish 'we support the troops!' mantra and start asking skeptical questions - and not accepting bland evasions or appeals to patriotism as a response. — Mike Lofgren

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The United States is now a bloated military empire on the cusp of steady and irrevocable economic decline. Historically, the danger in such cases is that when the fiscal stability of the empire begins to weaken, the governing elites double down on the very policies of military profligacy that caused the fiscal crisis in the first place. And that appears to be what the people who run America would like to do. This — Mike Lofgren

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The GOP's thirst for confrontation and crisis is symptomatic of a destructive and nihilistic streak that has overtaken our political system. When one party repudiates the whole concept of compromise, it is inevitable that the government will lurch from one crisis to another. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 916558

Owing to the lack of serious and informed popular interest in real issues, we have the current Republican menu of pseudo-issues: abortion, gay marriage, flag burning, prayer in schools, sharia law, and so on. They are simple to grasp and well within the ambit of the average person who does not follow politics. — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 908590

Liberals habitually work themselves into a lather about the antics of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, but they are really just political gargoyles looking for ratings as they whip up the GOP faithful. The true danger lies in an ostensibly neutral journalism that most Americans count on to tell them what is going on in the world but which too often acts as a stenographer for powerful and self-serving factions in government operating under a cloak of anonymity. — Mike Lofgren

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We must let our hopes be greater than our fears. — Mike Lofgren

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The Republican Party has used objection, obstruction, and filibustering not only to block the necessary processes of government but also in order to make ordinary Americans deeply cynical about Washington. Republicans perpetually run against government and come out on top. But, in the process, they are undermining the foundations of self-rule in a representative democracy. — Mike Lofgren

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The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe, — Mike Lofgren

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Like biblical literalists, Republicans assert that the Constitution is divinely inspired and inerrant. But also like biblical literalists, they are strangely selective about those portions of their favorite document that they care to heed, and they favor rewriting it when it stands in the way of their political agenda. — Mike Lofgren

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The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158 — Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren Quotes 605586

Both sanctions and bombing give the illusion of precision, calibration, and the capacity to ratchet up coercion in a gradual escalation. And both have the capacity to cause tremendous suffering among innocent third parties while having far less strategic effect than their advocates claim. — Mike Lofgren

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rogue state: a country that violates international law by committing armed aggression, torturing prisoners, assassinating opponents, and possessing weapons of mass destruction. — Mike Lofgren

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The United States forgot - if it ever knew - the supreme virtue of an enlightened realpolitik, which is to keep one's powder dry, intervene militarily as a last resort (rather than a first), and maintain industrial and fiscal strength at home. — Mike Lofgren