Least resistance

"I am part of the resistance inside the Trump Administration," begins the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times.  The self-described "senior official" delivers a condemnation of Trump that must have surprised exactly nobody who has paid attention to him for more than three minutes -- "amorality," really?  You just picked up on that?  But Senior Official wants to make it clear, with sneering quotation marks, that he is not of "the popular 'resistance' of the left" by praising all the wonderful tax cuts for the rich and the not much else accomplished by Dear Leader (no mention here of caged children, the flop North Korean summit, subservience to Putin -- need I go on?).  The game of Who Wrote It? has gone on all day, but it's obvious that Steve Bannon is not the only Trumpite who likes to suck his own cock (as Anthony Scaramucci so elegantly put it).  Anonymous just loves himself for saving America from the monster who employs him while neither quitting nor signing his name.  A coward after Cadet Bonespurs's own heart.

Soon after dinner I finally remembered where I read such an exercise:  "The Schmeed Memoirs" by Woody Allen, the reminiscences of the Third Reich's leading barber.  "Toward the end," he writes, "I thought of loosening the Fuhrer's neck-napkin and letting a few hairs go down his back, but my nerve failed me."  Read the whole piece.  It's a parody of the self-serving memoirs of Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and exploiter of who knows how many thousands of slave laborers, who got off with twenty years by acting all contrite at Nuremberg.  No doubt Speer fancied himself a resister, though one who managed to avoid both Stauffenberg's sacrifice and Goring's fate.  Vicious regimes never lack weasels.

And shame on The New York Times for making me agree with Trump:  If anonymity was the price of this "scoop," it was too high.  And now I have to shower.