Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Report From The Playground

I spent a couple of years teaching middle school, which meant proctoring study halls and recess.  This sounds a lot like a return to those days.

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster mocked President Trump’s intelligence at a private dinner with a powerful tech CEO, according to five sources with knowledge of the conversation.

Over a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz — who has been mentioned as a candidate for several potential administration jobs — McMaster bluntly trashed his boss, said the sources, four of whom told BuzzFeed News they heard about the exchange directly from Catz. The top national security official dismissed the president variously as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” the sources said.

A sixth source who was not familiar with the details of the dinner told BuzzFeed News that McMaster had made similarly derogatory comments about Trump’s intelligence to him in private, including that the president lacked the necessary brainpower to understand the matters before the National Security Council.

Both Oracle and the Trump administration heatedly denied the comments that Catz later recounted.

You know that when someone “heatedly” denies something, you’re on to the truth.

But what I want to know is if Mr. McMaster thinks so little of the guy who hired him, why is he still working for him?  Does he think somehow he’s going to either change him, or is he doing it out of some sense of patriotism by keeping him from doing something really dangerous?  If so, the way to fix that is to shout it from the rooftops, not gossip at some private dinner, and, while you’re at it, call in reinforcements.  He’s not going to go easily.