Mike Lofgren Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight,

Mike Lofgren

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Mike Lofgren

#8. The pressure to conform to an authority figure or peer group can cause people to behave in shocking ways.

Mike Lofgren

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

Mike Lofgren

#10. We must let our hopes be greater than our fears.

Mike Lofgren

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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