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Daniel Greenfield: End the War on Trump, Abolish the National Security Council…….


 

Special thanks to Lisa for the heads up on this article by Daniel that slipped past me…

 

End the War on Trump, Abolish the National Security Council

We can have free elections or the NSC.

 

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the latest star of the Democrat effort to undo the 2016 election, is still at work on the National Security Council. While Trump supporters on the NSC like Rich Higgins and Ezra Cohen-Watnick were forced out, Vindman won’t be. NSC staffers who criticized Obama holdovers or sought to expose their misbehavior are gone, but Vindman is still there while undermining Trump.

 

And that’s the SNAFU of things on the NSC.

 

The National Security Council has been ground zero in the campaign against President Trump from the beginning. General Flynn’s appointment as National Security Advisor had touched the third rail because the NSC had been used to coordinate anti-Trump operations in the Susan Rice era.

 

The NSC doesn’t answer to Congress. Its members are meant to advise the president. (Except when they’re actually working for a previous president.) They command the implements of foreign policy, traditionally the weakest element in domestic politics, but not when they start treating their domestic political opponents as agents of a foreign state. And the size of the NSC has gotten out of control.

 

Under Obama, the NSC staff hit 400 people. That’s up from a dozen during its Cold War origins.

 

And it’s the staff that’s the problem.

 

The NSC was born in the Truman era, not as a byzantine government bureaucracy full of endless departments and hundreds of staffers, but as a means for key foreign policy and national defense figures to coordinate, develop options and then present them to the President of the United States.

 

People like Vindman or Fiona Hill were never supposed to be there.

 

In the 1947 National Security Act, the Council was to consist of the Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the heads of the branches of the military, and various strategic services and agencies, who would meet at sessions presided over by the President.

 

There was also to be a staff “headed by a civilian executive secretary”.

 

What started out as a formal kitchen cabinet turned into a monster. And that didn’t exactly take decades. The NSC staff was at 50 people under George H.W. Bush. It hit 400 under Obama.

 

More here.

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