PENTAGON PLANNER AT CENTER OF KABUL DEBACLE: You may recall that Senate Republicans unanimously opposed His Fraudulency’s nomination of Colin Kahl as the Pentagon’s top strategic planner. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo and Alana Goodman report this morning that Kahl was at the center of the bungled evacuation’s planning.

“In Kahl, we have someone not even qualified for a security clearance at the center of President Biden’s incompetently planned and disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) tell Kredo and Goodman. Even a former Clinton administration State Department official is blasting Kahl’s appointment and his role in the Kabul debacle:

“Kahl ‘owns the [Department of Defense’s] failure to plan and implement a withdrawal that wouldn’t dishonor our veterans, our military, and our values,’ said Josh Block, a foreign policy scholar at the Hudson Institute and former Clinton administration State Department official. Block said Kahl is ‘unqualified for his job, a liability to American national security’ and ‘needs to be removed or made to resign,'” Kredo and Goodman report.

Frankly, if I was Kahl, I would be worried about being made the scapegoat for others’ failures. Spotlighting Kahl may be the start of a familiar Washington ritual that creates a shiny object to distract those calling for genuine accountability.