I repeat this excellent and precisely chosen adjective from a piece by Frank Rich:
But surely every Republican who has not come out against President Donorhea by now – Representative, Senator, opinion leader, spokes-Huckster, donor – is a Vichy Republican? Surely the argument is only whether the appropriate category is Fool (“Socialism! The email server! Traditional values! Swamp the drain!”) or else Cynical, Screw-Everyone Careerist (“People voting in the mid-terms must not be allowed to grasp that we’re unforgivable, value-free, entirely self-serving shits!”) And let’s bear in mind, when we do finally get rid of the disease-in-chief (and are facing the second nightmare that so-called Conservatism rained down upon us like the vomit of a diseased God: “President Pence”) that collaboration – or should we say Collaboration, to drive the point home? – is best neither forgiven or forgotten.
There is one fly in the rhetorical ointment, though, isn’t there? Rich reminds us that we all thought Trump would go down like a burning gasbag when he derided the service of John McCain. But no one in the Grand Old Pétain is more morally condemned, in the term “Vichy Republican,” than McCain himself, for no one had as transparent an opportunity and duty to end the horror than McCain, at the time of the attack on the Kahn family. Back then he so easily could have said, and so clearly should have said:
This is an unprecedented and insupportable insult to every man and woman who has ever served. It must not and cannot be allowed to stand. It proves that this man is unfit for public office of any kind. I now throw my full support behind Hillary Clinton.
But, as I have said before, he found Hillary distasteful, and just didn’t have the cojones to do the right thing.
Oh well. France got its democracy back in the end. And with a bit of luck, no thanks to the Republicans, we’ll get ours back without French troops having to die on the beaches of New Jersey.