Like Neera Tanden, Colin Kahl's got Twitter issues.

He's in line to become Joe Biden's number three man at the Pentagon, but his confirmation is running into pushback.

Senators are complaining about the former Biden foreign policy advisor's history of vile, mendacious tweets.

According to U.S. News & World Report:

PRESIDENT Joe Biden's nominee for the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon faced a contentious confirmation hearing Thursday with Republican senators taking aim at his fiery tweets in the last four years that they considered "incendiary," "intemperate and imbalanced insults."

Sen. Tom Cotton was the first at the Armed Services Committee hearing to center on some of the specifics of Colin Kahl's online presence during President Donald Trump's administration. The Arkansas Republican took issue with a tweet from October 2019 in which the former Pentagon staffer and Biden aide criticized GOP support for Trump's decision to unilaterally and suddenly withdraw forces from Syria, clearing the way for a Turkish assault on local forces that had fought and died for American interests there.

"The GOP used to pride itself as a party that put values front and center in US foreign policy. Now—as they debase themselves at the alter of Trump—they are the party of ethnic cleansing," Kahl wrote at the time.

And during the Trump administration back in 2018, Kahl said that if John Bolton replaced H.R. McMaster on the National Security Council, "we are all going to die."

He's quite charmer. And that's just two tweets cited. Obviously, he's on a warpath with Republicans and he can't put a stop to his bile.

Which is weird stuff for a guy supposedly in the foreign policy arena, and presumably familiar with diplomacy. Just his forecasting powers about who's gonna die ought to be a warning about his nomination.

But his insults are what's in the spotlight now. And like Tanden, he's belatedly trying to apologize. While they do indicate an intolerant cast of mind, not the guy you want advising Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on military policy, which is what he's nominated for, there's actually much worse about him that hasn't much been broached.

He's not just a guy who pops off, he's a guy who's enacted very bad policy. Exhibit A is in the major role he seemed to play with Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes in getting the U.S. involved with the naive and stupid Iran deal. That's the one that brought the mullahs billions of dollars by planes carrying pallets, and gave the mullahs the green light to go ahead and develop their nuclear bombs.

Exhibit B might in some ways be even worse. He's apparently a dirty trickster whose name again is linked to Ben Rhodes.

Remember all those creepy stories that were planted and coordinated in the press falsely claiming Seb Gorka was really a Nazi? They were flamingly bogus and total smears, and the behind-the-scenes creeps behind them got away with it.

A 2017 White House memo, which the New Yorker scoffingly reported in 2018, points to a White House analysis of the many efforts to undermine President Trump's foreign policy, with Kahl named as the ringleader. They begin (emphasis mine):

In early 2017, some of Donald Trump’s advisers concluded that they faced a sophisticated threat responsible for “coordinated attacks” on the new Administration. They circulated a memo, titled “The Echo Chamber,” which read like a U.S. military-intelligence officer’s analysis of a foreign-insurgent network. Instead of being about enemies in a distant war zone, however, the network described in the memo consisted of former aides to President Barack Obama.

The memo claimed that the “communications infrastructure” that the Obama White House used to “sell Obamacare and the Iran Deal to the public” had been moved to the private sector, now that the former aides were out of government. It called the network the Echo Chamber and accused its members of mounting a coördinated effort “to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy” through organized attacks in the press against Trump and his advisers. “These are the Obama loyalists who are probably among those coordinating the daily/weekly battle rhythm,” the memo said, adding that they likely operated a “virtual war room.” The memo lists Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to President Obama, as “likely the brain behind this operation” and Colin Kahl, Vice-President Joe Biden’s former national-security adviser, as its “likely ops chief.” Rhodes and Kahl both said in interviews that the allegations are false and no such organization exists.

Who, us? Make what you will of their denials. 

Neera Tanden made a lot of enemies through her schemings as a Democratic Party official plotting to steal the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton from Bernie Sanders. Now we have Kahl, who's been accused by the Trump White House of being one of the deep staters seeking to undermine U.S. foreign policy under Trump, which if true, suggests a highly unethical person.

Odds are good this master of the nasty tweet, charging Republicans with genocide, ethnic cleansing and making us all gonna die, over basic differences in foreign policy, might just be a political activist capable of dirty tricks, ya think? 

If so, there's no telling what he would do with the military. He was probably selected for his nastiness, and would never hesitate to throw his acid-bath tongue and cancel culture at any of our troops who question his undoubtedly bad wokester decisions. Maybe he's telling the truth that he wouldn't dream of any such acts. But can anyone trust him?

Image: Twitter screen shot