Whodunit?

All the politicos, pundits, and journalists in Washington are currently obsessed with discovering the identity of the anonymous op-ed writer in The New York Times. Not least among them are the president and the people who work in the White House. Well, at least some of the people who work in the White House; presumably some (or at least one) know who it is. The rest of us look on bemused and in some cases amused by all the scurrying around looking for answers.

It's not like this op-ed writer, whoever he or she is - and I'm going to refer to him as "he" - is telling us anything that any of us who have been paying attention didn't already know. The president is amoral; he serves no "first principle" except that of his own egotism. He doesn't believe in free minds, free markets, or free people; he continually attacks all of these ideas to inflame his deplorable and deluded true believers. His natural impulses are anti-trade and anti-democratic. He "engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back." 

Well, duh!

One has to wonder what this writer was hoping to accomplish by his screed. My personal opinion is that he was trying to insulate himself and buy insurance for his future. He was trying to have it both ways: By being anonymous, he's trying to maintain his position in the administration and, when everything eventually goes into the crapper, he'll stand up and say, "But I told you so and I tried to save the country. Remember when I wrote that op-ed?"

I really believe this person expected to be hailed as a hero for his writing. He must have been somewhat surprised by the majority reaction, namely that a hero would not remain anonymous. A hero would stand up and say, "This is what I have observed and here is the evidence. This man is mentally unfit for this job and the country and the world are in grave danger as long as he is in this position. The Constitution gives us the means to remove him by the 25th Amendment. We must suck up our courage and do it." 

If the writer actually could find the courage to do that, then perhaps all the other anonymous members of the "resistance inside the Trump Administration" would also stand up and say, "I am Spartacus!" 

Then they should all offer their resignations and get out of this fetid cesspool of an administration. At that point, it is possible that even the majority of Republicans in Congress could no longer ignore the grave danger to the country of allowing this man to continue. Then we might actually get somewhere. 

But whodunit? Who wrote the op-ed? 

Charlie Pierce's wife has a theory and I have to admit it makes a certain amount of sense. I won't give a name to the possible writer but I see him as a sanctimonious, self-serving individual, one who believes himself more righteous than others, who sees himself always as "the adult in the room" (a particularly Republican phrase), and one who perhaps burns to someday be president himself and who thinks that tax cuts for the wealthy (even if they increase the deficit by a trillion dollars), scrapping environmental regulations, confirming right-wing judges, and spending billions more on the military are all super-good ideas. But whoever he is, he is no Spartacus.