“It Was All A Lie- How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump”

by Stuart Stevens

from the publisher– “In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies… This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history… Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it.”

–Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times

From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today.

Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP’s DNA, from Goldwater’s opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens and states’ rights rhetoric. He gives an insider’s account of the rank hypocrisy of the party’s claims to embody “family values,” and shows how the party’s vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

…and from Multnomah County Library…

Multnomah County Library Permanently Ends Late Fees and Clears All Existing Fines, Shannon Gormley in Willamette Week, July 2020

“After suspending late fees during the pandemic, Multnomah County Library has decided to make the change permanent: Portlanders will no longer be charged for returning books late, effective immediately. In addition, all existing fines have been cleared.

There will still be due dates, and library will continue to charge replacement costs. If a book has not been returned 49 days after the due date, the patron will be billed for its replacement…”