Wall Street Journal: Only the Elite Are Entitled to Opinions

The Wall Street Journal slammed conservative media Wednesday for criticizing the views and associations of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in the wake of his firing of several pro-Israel Iran hawks and Trump supporters from the National Security Council.

“The NSC adviser is the latest target of Steve Bannon’s media friends,” the Journal opined, adding:

Somehow the Bannon brigades outside the White House decided to assail the general as insufficiently pro-Israel and not hostile enough to Islamic State, among other calumnies. The latter is especially preposterous since then Colonel McMaster developed the counter-insurgency strategy in Tal Afar that was the prototype for the 2007 “surge” that won the Iraq War.

Note that the second sentence has nothing to do with the first. The so-called Islamic State arose long after the “surge,” after President Barack Obama’s overly hasty withdrawal from Iraq.

No one has questioned McMaster’s military credentials. Rather, what Breitbart News has uncovered, and highlighted, are his past links to the left-wing Middle East policy orthodoxies that many Trump voters thought they had rejected with their votes in November.

These are policies that the Journal editors reject themselves. But they cannot tolerate it when the same views are expressed by the plebians — the grass-roots conservatives whom the Journal once infamously derided as “hobbits.”

Unlike the Journal, Breitbart News does not publish staff editorials, and rarely even publishes op-eds. Our coverage of McMaster has largely consisted of reporting previously unknown or ignored aspects of his background.

He did not have to face Senate confirmation: he was appointed hastily, and under pressure from anti-Trump voices in the media and the Republican establishment. Like Obama, he was never properly vetted.

Trump supporters were more or less happy to trust the choices of the commander-in-chief, even if McMaster was known to have rejected the term “radical Islamic terror,” on the same spurious grounds that Obama embraced. But McMaster’s recent actions have raised new cause for concern. That is the context in which Breitbart News has been revisiting the man and his record.

For the editors of the Wall Street Journal, apparently, facts do not count as much as status, and only the elite media are entitled to opinions.

They seem not to have received the message voters sent in November, which was as much a rebellion against the media establishment as it was against the progressive policies with which McMaster, at times, aligned himself.