Vichy

Trump is besieged on all sides, except from his own GOP, which is insultingly silent on everything, except tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Frank Rick takes a look at "anonymous" and the circus around Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe it's time the citizens started voting on who will sit on the SCOTUS. That might eliminate this farce of a charade that we go thru with every SCOTUS nomination. 

The Anonymous White House Official Is a Collaborator, Not a Resister

Frank Rich in The New Yorker magazine

Despite the depiction of a “nervous breakdown” of the American presidency — senior aides interfering with presidential duties and ignoring direct orders, claiming to protect Donald Trump from himself — in Bob Woodward’s new book and yesterday’s anonymous Times op-ed, the wider GOP has been slow to push back against either the claims or the president. Is the party betting that these revelations will blow over?

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. It’s also how the departed economic adviser Gary Cohn — clearly a major source for Woodward — saw himself. 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. The Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple has a point when he dismisses the op-ed as “a P.R. stunt” for the Times, since it adds an intriguing guessing game but no news to what we already know about this White House from Woodward and even Omarosa, not to mention the stalwart work of reporters at the Times and Post since Inauguration Day.

But the 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 Crazytownhas 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.

Many people have been following Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings to learn more about the nominee’s views on two topics that may, in the near future, be before the court: abortion rights and the legal limits of the presidency. Have any of Kavanaugh’s answers tipped his hand?

The hearings have done nothing to contradict what we knew before they began. Of course Kavanaugh is going to do his part to restrict abortion rights, no matter what his evasive double talk about “precedent upon precedent.” The only person in America on either side of the question who thinks he favors upholding Roe v. Wade is Senator Susan Collins of Maine. And, as his refusal to answer particular “hypothetical” questions indicate, 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.

“What kind of country have we become?” whined Lindsey Graham, appalled that Kavanaugh’s daughters had to witness rude protesters in the hearing room on opening day. Thanks to Graham and his cohort, we have become Trump country. In keeping with that, the hearings are a clown show, a bare simulation of democratic procedure, with withheld evidence, unexamined evidence delivered in a last-minute document dump, and a foregone conclusion. In that spirit, here’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.

Original.