It’s really hard not to laugh out loud at liberal New York Times writer Michelle Cottle’s defense of all the career government employees who make up the so-called “deep state” by describing them as “patriotic public servants.”

I hate the term “deep state” because it sounds so conspiratorial. But if Cottle agrees that it’s just a synonym for “permanent Washington bureaucrats,” fine. But the only reason she might honestly believe those people are nothing more than civic-minded diplomats is because she doesn’t know any.

“President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well,” she wrote Sunday. “But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.”

Isn’t that precisely what people like James Comey and Andrew McCabe have revealed themselves to be? Just two patriotic public servants who wanted nothing more than to protect the interests of the American people.

Oh, wait, no, that’s not right. It turned out that Comey, former head of the FBI, was leaking information to the New York Times in order to hurt President Trump. Then he lied to Congress about doing just that.

Andrew McCabe, the FBI's deputy director, was fired shortly before his retirement, also for leaking to the media and then lying about it, and he has since spent his days getting paid by CNN to call for Trump’s impeachment.

The federal government is packed with people like this— people who have lived in Washington for most or all of their adult lives, doing very little actual work while promoting themselves, lying a lot, and making a lot of money. If you’ve ever wondered why there’s truly very little difference between Democratic and Republican administrations, these people are a big reason why. Their job is almost by definition to keep things the way they are, regardless of who was elected and why.

Trump may have been elected to “shake things up” but if we’ve learned anything from his first three years in office it’s that there are a lot of people whose paychecks depend in part on making sure that doesn’t happen.

The so-called “whistleblower” at the center of the Ukraine issue that has now likely led to Trump’s impeachment is exactly this kind of person. I have no idea if he’s a patriot. But let’s not pretend that he must have been motivated by some devotion to the American ideal.

Far more likely, he’s the same as the other career government employees who don’t like Trump and don’t want to see Washington change. And that isn’t patriotism. It’s politics.