One surprising revelation the author exposes is the taxpayer funding of Democrat and Republican political parties outside of the United States. I bet few readers are aware that each party has an international division. The Democrats have the National Democratic Institute and the Republicans have the International Republican Institute. Both organizations are tax exempt charities. But instead of being funded by donors, they’re funded by taxpayers via the State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Shaped by the media

The author does a fine job explaining America’s War on Terror and even uses this author’s longtime criticism that we’re at war with an emotion. ‘The war on terrorism was a propagandistic success just as surely as it was a failure both of logic and of national strategy,’ Lofgren writes, ‘Like an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, the war on terrorism soon mutated into something else: the war on “terror.” This subtle but telling semantic shift was yet another turn of the screw. Terrorism is at least a technique of militants. Terror is an emotion. How can one make war on a subjective mental state?’

In addition to the backward reality the American media presented in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror, the author brings readers a whole slew of new terminology used by the political class and amplified by the nation’s corporate-owned news outlets. While he is correct for the most part, this is another example where author insists that only his fellow Republicans are guilty. Apparently he’s never watched MSNBC, CNN or any of the major networks.

Devil’s Dictionary

That’s the title of the section of ‘The Party Is Over’ where Lofgren gives humorous but true definitions of today’s political terminology. Just some of the examples are:

• American Exceptionalism: A doctrine whose proponents hold that by divine dispensation America is exempt from all laws governing international norms, physics, or rationality.

• Authentic: Used to describe a candidate who is unaware of current events and doesn’t read a newspaper, and is proud of it.

• Empower: If an American worker loses his pension or Social Security, he is empowered.

• Job Creators: The truly creative engines of economic growth in our society: real-estate flippers, mortgage-backed securities bundlers, leveraged buyout specialists, dividend drawers, and hedge-fund billionaires.

• Patriot: Someone who loves America more than he loves the majority of the people living therein.

• Tea Party: People covered by Medicare who hate socialized medicine.

• Take our Country back: Give us what we want right now, even if we don’t know what it is.

Exposing his fellow Republicans

After nearly three decades in Congress serving the Republican Party, author Mike Lofgren goes on to pile example after example of corruption on the same Washington GOP powerbrokers. One memory he recalls in the book is that of US Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and an interview he gave with a newspaper immediately after assuming the Chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee, “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated. And my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

The book also describes the cozy relationship between the Republican Party and the military industrial complex. Lofgren reminds readers that while the GOP despises any social welfare for the American people, they are staunch supporters of what he terms ‘military socialism’. ‘Loudoun County, Virginia, an outer suburb of Washington DC, offers a perfect example of this ethos,’ the author writes, ‘It is the richest county in the United States when measured by median household income.’

He goes on to explain, ‘It is very enthusiastically Republican. And the number one and number two military contractors in the country, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, are located there. Fairfax County, the county next to Loudoun, has the second-highest median household income in the country. The fifth-ranked military contractor, General Dynamics, is based there.’

State-sponsored media

Author Mike Lofgren doesn’t just stick it to the GOP. He goes after the country’s corrupt media industry. The book explains, ‘According to a 2012 evaluation by Reporters Without Borders, the United States’ press ranks as only the forty-seventh freest in the world. One of the criteria the organization used to determine its ranking was whether the press in a given country practiced self-censorship, regardless of the formal legal protection it might enjoy (the United States ranked particularly poorly in the 2012 report, sliding twenty-seven places from the previous evaluation, because so many reporters had been arrested covering Occupy Wall Street protests).’

Another section of the book details the personal story of a White House reporter who was enlightened by a Bush administration staffer, “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued, ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

That pretty much sums up the book ‘The Party Is Over’ by Mike Lofgren. While the author takes extra time to chastise Republicans, he also shows that Democrats are no different. Lofgren’s book details the corruption permeating Washington from the eyes of someone who lived it and participated in it for 28 years. It’s definitely an eye-opening book for those interested in seeing how their federal government really works.