The New York “Walter Duranty” Times is up to its old tricks again:

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.

How many minutes (or seconds) of arm-twisting did it take the Times to publish this anonymous op-ed weeks before the midterms in the midst of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings?

Whatever the case, the political views of this “courageous” official, who insists insiders like him or her are saving us from the dreaded Trump, can be found in the penultimate paragraphs of his article.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation. We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.

John McCain? A lodestar? For the last dozen years or so John McCain had been the bête noire of virtually all conservatives and libertarians, betraying them on multiple occasions, most recently on the Obamacare vote, which he held to the last second to apply maximum torture to Donald Trump. Whatever McCain thought about the policy seemed immaterial.

Yes, McCain had reason to be angry with Trump, who said nasty things about his military service, but then McCain had previously said nasty things about the idea of Trump running in the first place. If McCain’s a lodestar for anything it’s expediency and slavish playing up to the media.

But it’s ironic to see him lauded in the pages of the New York Times, the very paper that falsely accused the senator of having an affair roughly a month before his 2008 presidential election, not owning up to its lie for months.

Nevertheless let’s give Mr. Anonymous his due and address his arguments. They seem to center on foreign policy because he does deign to admit the new tax law and deregulation are a good thing, though, in his eyes, Trump had little to do with it.

His big complaint, once again, is that the president is soft on Putin and Kim Jong-un. He discounts, actually doesn’t mention, the obvious possibility that Trump has been playing good cop/bad cop, complimenting the despots personally while sticking it to them on policy (sanctions, etc.). Instead, he insists that the president is being saved from his affinity for dictators by his hard-nosed staff, not bothering to note that such hawks as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton were originally chosen by Trump and seem to be working quite well with him.

Whether the god cop/bad cop approach will ultimately work is clearly an open question, but that previous approaches have failed is not. Curiously missing from the op-ed is any mention of Trump’s Middle East policy, which has been tremendously advantageous to Israel and disadvantageous to Iran. Is our anonymous correspondent for this or not?

Maybe it doesn’t matter in his/her weltanschauung. He/she calls the president immoral, but what’s moral about an anonymous attack? It’s certainly not a profile in courage.

What the Times is publishing here for its own very temporary convenience is inside propaganda from the hoary ultra-establishment wing of the Republican Party. It is the Deep State in action, though the author claims to represent the “steady state.”

The man or woman who wrote this article is in actuality an abject coward, the kind of tattletale who is afraid to identify himself or herself for fear of losing a government job. How pathetic is that? Why would anyone trust such a person?

Oh, yes, I bet somebody did — Bob Woodward. We should ask him who it is.

Roger L. Simon – co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media – is an author and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.