Review of The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren
I'm sorry, I can't keep reading hostile and juvenile drivel like this. I stopped on page 130. Where do I start with reasons why? The list is too long:
o The constant insults to anyone Lofgren doesn't like, which is any Republican
o The faulty research in spots, which makes me suspect the whole effort
o The extraordinary partisan presentation of facts
o The cherry-picking, revisionist history
The list goes on and on. I'm sorry I bought this book and put my hard-earned money into Mike Lofgren's bank account.
Know this: I'm a life-long, registered Independent, and I was eagerly looking forward to reading this book. I really wanted to get some insight from a person "on the inside" for so many years as a Washington bureaucrat, someone who could shed some light on America's decline, why it's happening, and the complex, multi-faceted issues facing our nation, and our world. I wanted to be informed with accurate, revealing, and unbiased history, information, and data. Instead, what I got was a book written like an undergraduate's breathless screed. "And did you know about *this*? And did you know about *that*?"
Lofgren claims that his "purpose with this book is to question the rationale of the game rather than attack the player who happens to be at bat in any given inning" (p. 34). Really? Could've fooled me. In the sentence before he called Bush the "lamentable specimen." And throughout the 130 pages I read Lofgren seems to take any opportunity to rail against Republicans, often in hideous and sophomoric ways: Vice President Cheney is "a physical as well as political trogldyte" (p. 28); Obama faces "ferocious Republican obstruction" (p. 31) -- neverminding this gem I saw on Twitter recently: "If the American left hadn't firebombed the big open space in the middle where discourse used to be, we wouldn't be dealing with Trump now."- Tom Nichols; George W. Bush was "out of his depth" when he became president (p. 33) (but Barack Obama, a man who served 743 days in the Senate from his swearing in to the announcement of his exploratory committee for U.S. president, is "qualified"???); Nixon was the "arch-ogre of Watergate" (p. 52). Another Republican is a "useful idiot" (p. 58). The insults for any conservative continue. It's exhausting. Page 128 is his first crack at Fox News. So sad, so misguided, and so uninformed. (But not surprising, after all. Research done across 9 nations, including the U.S., shows that conservatives are happier than leftists, even controlling for personal income. It's a measurable "happiness gap," and it's due to socio-political beliefs and values. They see the glass as half empty, and someone's got to be at fault.)
I'll stop there. There's plenty of blame to go all around. I understand the military-industrial complex better than the average American. Why heap responsibility (and insults) on one side? But Lofgren goes on and on with the traditional It’s Bush’s Fault® mentality typical of the modern American progressive Democrat. In my view, progressives--just as they're heaping insults on any thing and any one they disdain on The Right--are becoming caricatures of themselves.
Here are some points to consider before you purchase this book. Lofgren's attitudes seep everywhere:
1. Democrats good; Republicans bad is his mantra. Nixon is quite literally an ogre; but Bill Clinton is "a quick learner" of the crooked and failed system. Such a dualistic view of the American political landscape is myopic and simplistic at best and childish and retarded at worst. Even as a teenager I understood this; it's why I became a registered Independent at 18. I'd pose this question to Lofgren: So, you believe that money and power and influence are evil things in Republican hands, but when they're in Democrat hands they're wielded for "good" purposes?
2. The New York Times and the Washington Post are the received texts, and the Wall Street Journal is evil personified.
3. Corporate-funded think tanks are bad, but only if they fund conservative/Republican ideas.
4. The fantasy of a nuclear-weapons-free world. I can't. I won't even address this modern-day liberal delusion.
Here's the best:
5. "The United States uses its military muscle to sustain its economic model and dissuade other countries from deviating from its orthodoxies" (p. 109).
Now, I read Lofgren in context here to intimate the following from him:
A. He's genuinely surprised by it
and
B. He wants us, his readers, to be genuinely surprised by it, too
In reality, I think a first-year History major understands that, through all of recorded history, nations have been doing this. It's called self-preservation. I'd really like to ask Lofgren: Do you actually suppose that the United States is alone in this? Is that your thesis? That only the U.S. uses its military to try to get its way? That China, Russia, India, Pakistan, etc etc are not doing the exact same thing? And that smaller nations are aligning themselves where they can for their own self-interests and self-preservation? Nations and empires and countries have been doing this since...recorded history. This is what states do. They protect themselves and they protect (what they see as) their interests. In this and many other regards, Lofgren needs to grow up.
In addition to all this, I found it exhausting to read this book because I ended up doing my own fact-checking, Sometimes this will happen when I'm reading non-fiction, but I've never experienced it to this extent. It seemed like I was doing this on nearly every page. Let me correct here a few of Lofgren's mistakes and misunderstandings (I'm being generous):
1. "....the McCarythite hysteria over internal subversion..." (p. 51). Some historians have shown that McCarthy was essentially right. Whether it was stealing atomic secrets or influencing U.S. foreign policy, communist victories in the 1940s were fed by an incredibly vast spy and influence network. (sources: http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/joe-... and http://www.academia.org/cornell-the-c...)
2. The liberal lie that there were no WMDs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. See "The New York Times Rediscovers Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq".
3. Logren's assessments on the US use of torture as a policy is laughable at best and dangerously naive at worst. Of course our operatives use torture, and of course it's not reported to Congress. How dumb can you possibly be? Do you live in John Lennon's "Imagine" world, or do you live in the real world?
4. Nixon "suddenly" took the U.S. off the gold standard. There was nothing "sudden" about it. See: http://www.federalreservehistory.org/...
5. Manufacturing leaving the U.S. was only seeping into the public's consciousness in the early 1990s. I think Lofgren is betraying his cloistered D.C. viewpoint here. I was living in Ohio during the 1970s and 1980s, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that the Midwest was well- versed and -experienced with outsourcing a decade before Lofgren thinks it was.
There's much more, of course, but you see my point.
So, to sum up: Too many partisan attacks. Too many personal insults. Too much history rewritten. Too much research left undone. Mostly what Lofgren is providing here is his own inaccurate, biased, and cherry-picked story. The little bit of new and accurate information I got was overwhelmed by all of the problems. This book is neither a journalistic nor a scholarly work. It's one zealot's account, that's all. And it's a real shame. I wanted to read and get some insight into how here in the U.S. this is no longer a government of the people, by the people, or for the people. What I got instead was a bunch of loosely connected sophomoric rantings from a leftist idealogue who relishes heaping insults on any anyone who doesn't see the world his way. Which is the progressive Democrat way. In other words: You're an idiot if your opinion doesn't match mine. Lofgren reads like a kid with a stick poking into the lion's cage. It's sad, really. He comes off as a fool, not the "truth teller" he claims to be. I put the book down at page 130 and tagged it on my Goodreads shelf books-i-gave-up-reading.
1 star
o The constant insults to anyone Lofgren doesn't like, which is any Republican
o The faulty research in spots, which makes me suspect the whole effort
o The extraordinary partisan presentation of facts
o The cherry-picking, revisionist history
The list goes on and on. I'm sorry I bought this book and put my hard-earned money into Mike Lofgren's bank account.
Know this: I'm a life-long, registered Independent, and I was eagerly looking forward to reading this book. I really wanted to get some insight from a person "on the inside" for so many years as a Washington bureaucrat, someone who could shed some light on America's decline, why it's happening, and the complex, multi-faceted issues facing our nation, and our world. I wanted to be informed with accurate, revealing, and unbiased history, information, and data. Instead, what I got was a book written like an undergraduate's breathless screed. "And did you know about *this*? And did you know about *that*?"
Lofgren claims that his "purpose with this book is to question the rationale of the game rather than attack the player who happens to be at bat in any given inning" (p. 34). Really? Could've fooled me. In the sentence before he called Bush the "lamentable specimen." And throughout the 130 pages I read Lofgren seems to take any opportunity to rail against Republicans, often in hideous and sophomoric ways: Vice President Cheney is "a physical as well as political trogldyte" (p. 28); Obama faces "ferocious Republican obstruction" (p. 31) -- neverminding this gem I saw on Twitter recently: "If the American left hadn't firebombed the big open space in the middle where discourse used to be, we wouldn't be dealing with Trump now."- Tom Nichols; George W. Bush was "out of his depth" when he became president (p. 33) (but Barack Obama, a man who served 743 days in the Senate from his swearing in to the announcement of his exploratory committee for U.S. president, is "qualified"???); Nixon was the "arch-ogre of Watergate" (p. 52). Another Republican is a "useful idiot" (p. 58). The insults for any conservative continue. It's exhausting. Page 128 is his first crack at Fox News. So sad, so misguided, and so uninformed. (But not surprising, after all. Research done across 9 nations, including the U.S., shows that conservatives are happier than leftists, even controlling for personal income. It's a measurable "happiness gap," and it's due to socio-political beliefs and values. They see the glass as half empty, and someone's got to be at fault.)
I'll stop there. There's plenty of blame to go all around. I understand the military-industrial complex better than the average American. Why heap responsibility (and insults) on one side? But Lofgren goes on and on with the traditional It’s Bush’s Fault® mentality typical of the modern American progressive Democrat. In my view, progressives--just as they're heaping insults on any thing and any one they disdain on The Right--are becoming caricatures of themselves.
Here are some points to consider before you purchase this book. Lofgren's attitudes seep everywhere:
1. Democrats good; Republicans bad is his mantra. Nixon is quite literally an ogre; but Bill Clinton is "a quick learner" of the crooked and failed system. Such a dualistic view of the American political landscape is myopic and simplistic at best and childish and retarded at worst. Even as a teenager I understood this; it's why I became a registered Independent at 18. I'd pose this question to Lofgren: So, you believe that money and power and influence are evil things in Republican hands, but when they're in Democrat hands they're wielded for "good" purposes?
2. The New York Times and the Washington Post are the received texts, and the Wall Street Journal is evil personified.
3. Corporate-funded think tanks are bad, but only if they fund conservative/Republican ideas.
4. The fantasy of a nuclear-weapons-free world. I can't. I won't even address this modern-day liberal delusion.
Here's the best:
5. "The United States uses its military muscle to sustain its economic model and dissuade other countries from deviating from its orthodoxies" (p. 109).
Now, I read Lofgren in context here to intimate the following from him:
A. He's genuinely surprised by it
and
B. He wants us, his readers, to be genuinely surprised by it, too
In reality, I think a first-year History major understands that, through all of recorded history, nations have been doing this. It's called self-preservation. I'd really like to ask Lofgren: Do you actually suppose that the United States is alone in this? Is that your thesis? That only the U.S. uses its military to try to get its way? That China, Russia, India, Pakistan, etc etc are not doing the exact same thing? And that smaller nations are aligning themselves where they can for their own self-interests and self-preservation? Nations and empires and countries have been doing this since...recorded history. This is what states do. They protect themselves and they protect (what they see as) their interests. In this and many other regards, Lofgren needs to grow up.
In addition to all this, I found it exhausting to read this book because I ended up doing my own fact-checking, Sometimes this will happen when I'm reading non-fiction, but I've never experienced it to this extent. It seemed like I was doing this on nearly every page. Let me correct here a few of Lofgren's mistakes and misunderstandings (I'm being generous):
1. "....the McCarythite hysteria over internal subversion..." (p. 51). Some historians have shown that McCarthy was essentially right. Whether it was stealing atomic secrets or influencing U.S. foreign policy, communist victories in the 1940s were fed by an incredibly vast spy and influence network. (sources: http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/joe-... and http://www.academia.org/cornell-the-c...)
2. The liberal lie that there were no WMDs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. See "The New York Times Rediscovers Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq".
3. Logren's assessments on the US use of torture as a policy is laughable at best and dangerously naive at worst. Of course our operatives use torture, and of course it's not reported to Congress. How dumb can you possibly be? Do you live in John Lennon's "Imagine" world, or do you live in the real world?
4. Nixon "suddenly" took the U.S. off the gold standard. There was nothing "sudden" about it. See: http://www.federalreservehistory.org/...
5. Manufacturing leaving the U.S. was only seeping into the public's consciousness in the early 1990s. I think Lofgren is betraying his cloistered D.C. viewpoint here. I was living in Ohio during the 1970s and 1980s, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that the Midwest was well- versed and -experienced with outsourcing a decade before Lofgren thinks it was.
There's much more, of course, but you see my point.
So, to sum up: Too many partisan attacks. Too many personal insults. Too much history rewritten. Too much research left undone. Mostly what Lofgren is providing here is his own inaccurate, biased, and cherry-picked story. The little bit of new and accurate information I got was overwhelmed by all of the problems. This book is neither a journalistic nor a scholarly work. It's one zealot's account, that's all. And it's a real shame. I wanted to read and get some insight into how here in the U.S. this is no longer a government of the people, by the people, or for the people. What I got instead was a bunch of loosely connected sophomoric rantings from a leftist idealogue who relishes heaping insults on any anyone who doesn't see the world his way. Which is the progressive Democrat way. In other words: You're an idiot if your opinion doesn't match mine. Lofgren reads like a kid with a stick poking into the lion's cage. It's sad, really. He comes off as a fool, not the "truth teller" he claims to be. I put the book down at page 130 and tagged it on my Goodreads shelf books-i-gave-up-reading.
1 star
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