There's a Stalinist wind blowing through the halls of the NSC. In come the purges and out come the defenses of the indefensible. And when your friends are purged, you praise the purgers.
In my piece on the McMaster purges of NSC personnel who understood the Islamic terror threat and the threat of the Obama holdovers, I began with Derek Harvey.
Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.
The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.
It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.
But it was actually the Weekly Standard which first wrote about Harvey's firing. And for good reason. Derek Harvey had been their man. He had written a number of pieces for them. It praised Harvey and expressed a certain muted discomfort with his firing.
Since then, the Standard jumped all the way on the McMaster train. On Twitter, Bill Kristoll claims that the criticism of McMaster is a Russian conspiracy. Was Harvey another Russian agent. Who knows.
But we are incessantly told that Harvey was too close to Bannon. Apparently the Standard deems him closer to Bannon while it's closer to McMaster. And so everyone stands by their team. And yet the Standard certainly can't criticize Harvey on any substantive matter. How could it, considering Harvey's past with them. So instead the Standard assures us that McMaster's firing of a man they deem brilliant and insightful was justified because he was too close to someone McMaster doesn't like. This is supposed to be a defense of McMaster rather than a criticism.
The latest shrill Weekly Standard spin piece declares, "The war on White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster continues". It claims that, "McMaster recently fired two National Security Council staff members—Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick—in part because both aides regularly met with Bannon without notifying McMaster."
So we've got McMaster, by the Standard's spin, firing a brilliant thinker for meeting with another member of the administration without asking for permission first.
In the process, the Standard continues its despicable dirt-hurling at Ezra Cohen-Watnick whose real crime was exposing the Obama eavesdropping against the administration.
Meanwhile the Standard can't actually offer much of a defense of the Obama holdovers, of Kris Bauman or any of the other McMaster swamp creatures. Instead it sneers and dismisses the criticism with a flick of the wrist. This is all that the pro-McMaster defenses amount to. It's all that they can amount to.
But there is something Stalinist in the Weekly Standard turning on a man they praised because their pal had decided he had to go. It's a sad decline for those who once opposed such things.