Short answer: it’s run by political hacks who have muscled aside or ignored the sober-minded and experienced professionals who have served in the National Security Council since President Truman established it to deal with the realities of the Cold War and American leadership. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel chronicles the decline and fall of institutional safeguards of the national interest: …the NSC has been by procedure and fierce tradition a rare apolitical forum, a place for the president to hear hard reality. NSC staff are foreign-policy grownups, and its meetings are barred to political henchmen. Or that was the case, until the Obama White House. By early March 2009, two months into this presidency, the New York Times had run a profile of David Axelrod, noting that Mr. Obama's top campaign guru and "political protector" was now "often" to be found "in the late afternoons" walking "to the Situation...(Read Full Post)