Hmmm. I Guess "Off the Record" Is Relative...

Well, I guess shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you’ve been paying attention, but some otherwise bright folks are so enamored with the sound of their own voice that they can’t be bothered to pay attention:

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The White House abruptly dismissed a senior National Security Council aide on Friday after receiving reports that he had publicly laced into the president and his senior aides, including son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump at an event hosted by a Washington think tank.

The aide, Craig Deare, was serving as the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Earlier in the week, at a private, off-the-record roundtable hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center for a group of about two dozen scholars, Deare harshly criticized the president and his chief strategist Steve Bannon and railed against the dysfunction paralyzing the Trump White House, according to a source familiar with the situation.

He complained in particular that senior national security aides do not have access to the president — and gave a detailed and embarrassing readout of Trump’s call with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto.

Last week it was disclose that Elliot Abrams will not get the job as Deputy Secretary of State because of some unkind things he said about Trump during the campaign. Likewise, yesterday, one of Ben Carson’s top aides was given the heave ho for the same reason.

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While I think dropping Abrams and Shermichael is a little over the top, this is perfectly justified. I don’t know what kind of access to the president senior NSC staffers have historically had so I’m agnostic on that. NSC is a policy coordination body, not a policy making body, and I can see perfectly good reasons why they would not have presidential access. Disparaging the president and the president’s family is the sign of a character flaw that is eventually going to cause unfortunate things to happen. A person who will do this kind of thing will leak to the press and sabotage others to get his way.

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