The Anonymous White House Official Is a Collaborator,

Perhaps it was the way I was raised, but when one sees and evil and danger, one has a moral duty to remove it, if possible, not merely collaborate with it and play mental gymnastics rationalizing that you are somehow restraining the evil.  The author of the anonymous op-ed run by the New York Times is, in my view, a collaborator with the evils of the Trump?pence regime and willing to engage in harming the country on a long term basis all so that the very rich can enjoy huge tax cuts which are ballooning the national debt and so that regulations constraining the worse inclinations of large corporations can be rolled back.  The lives and future of average Americans are nowhere within this toxic agenda.  Frank Rich has a spot on piece at New York Magazine that looks at the Vichy Republicans and the equally toxic and hypocrisy-filled Brett Kavanaugh.  Here are excerpts (for Fox News viewers, "Vichy Republicans" is a comparison with the French who collaborated with the Nazi's in France in WWII):

For once Trump is right: the “anonymous” Times op-ed is “gutless.” The anonymity allows its author to do what every other cowering administration figure and Republican leader has done since Inauguration Day — duck any responsibility for what is happening and retreat from any real pushback against Trump. If we are to believe Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous, he and his fellow in-house Trump resisters are the “adults in the room” and “unsung heroes” who are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” This is no doubt how Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and all the rest of the president’s Vichy Republicans see themselves too. But which of Trump’s “worst inclinations” have any of them frustrated? The ripping apart of immigrant families? The nonstop race-baiting and the condoning of white neo-Nazis at Charlottesville? The assaults on Americans’ health care, on LGBT rights, on the press? The nonstop ethical abuses and kleptomania of the Trump family and Cabinet members? The wholesale effort to sabotage the rule of law?
 The anonymous author, like every other Trump enabler, essentially says don’t worry, we have the country’s back, and any White House horror is worth it in exchange for “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” At least when those like Lindsey Graham espouse such a rationale they attach their names to it. Mr. Anonymous is a coward so lacking a moral compass that he doesn’t realize that the best way to “preserve our democratic institutions” (as he claims to be doing) is to identify himself, resign, and report any criminal activity he has witnessed by the president or his colleagues. [T]he piece could also be viewed as a P.R. strategy for its author. It reads like a defense document that’s being put on the record should that rainy day come when Mr. Anonymous, no longer anonymous, will have to defend his own actions in a Nuremberg-like legal reckoning once the king of Crazytown has been carted off. As any student of Vichy knows, there was no shortage of French collaborators who falsely claimed to have been secretly part of the underground Resistance to the Pétain regime once the war was over. Kavanaugh also stands ready to help Trump evade the law. He refused to say whether he believes the president can defy a subpoena or pardon himself, and he refused to recuse himself from any forthcoming cases which might involve Trump. He even refused to condemn Trump’s tweet attacking the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, Jeff Sessions, for permitting the indictments of two Republican congressmen accused of wholesale financial theft. [H]ere’s what I would ask Kavanaugh if I were a Democratic senator on the Judiciary Committee: “Explain your thinking when you wrote a legal memo to the independent counsel Kenneth Starr proposing that President Clinton be asked this question and nine others like it: ‘If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?’” And in further keeping with the ethos set by the “grab ’em by the pussy” president who nominated Kavanaugh, I would ask that question aloud before the nominee’s family. The answer might well illuminate the future justice’s view of women and their right to govern their own bodies with a specificity missing in his obfuscating filibusters about Roe. My favorite take on it all was from Tim Miller, a Never-Trump Republican political operator who’d worked for Jeb Bush in 2016. “Here’s my problem with saying a eulogy is an ‘implicit critique of the president,’” he wrote on Twitter. “It is impossible to praise someone’s commitment to American values or highlight admirable character traits without implicitly criticizing Trump bc he doesn’t believe in them and he has none.”