Pentagon pick for top job accused Barack Obama of being a terrorist

The Pentagon is waiting for a whole host of key jobs to be confirmed by the Senate. In fact it looks pretty unlikely that they will all be confirmed before the November election. This has always been a problem at the Pentagon. In fact other departments suffer the same delay too. But somehow with the Pentagon, individual senators get all huffy about particular individual nominations and nothing happens. This is currently what is going on with Anthony Tata, a retired army brigadier-general and a totally loyal defender of Trump in his current capacity as commentator on Fox News. Trump has nominated Tata to be the next undersecretary for policy, one of the top three or four jobs at the Pentagon. But oh dear a tweet was uncovered in which some years back Tata accused Barack Obama of being a terrorist leader. Hardly surprising therefore that the most senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, has said he will block Tata's appointment. The vacancy for undersecretary for policy came up after the previous holder of the appointment, John Rood, was booted out for not being sufficiently loyal to the president. The job has been filled by a standby official for the last four months. It sounds like Tata hasn't got a hope in hell of getting the job. So it will remain vacant till the election unless Reed can be persuaded to forget that alarming tweet. Anyone who felt it necessary to tweet that Obama was a terrorist leader should never be appointed undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon in my opinion. But with the absence of so many top officials at the Pentagon it's not surprising that Mark Esper, the US defence secretary, seems unsure where he is going some of the time. The other top jobs still to be confirmed by the Senate include Shon Manasco, nominated to be air force undersecretary, Louis Bremer, assistant secretary for special operations, Lucas Polakowski, assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defence, and Bradley Hansell, deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence. Nearly a third of the 60 Pentagon nominations that went to the Senate for confirmation are still unresolved. Bureaucracy gone mad!