Some unforced political errors are so baffling, you wish you could’ve been in the room to witness how multiple brains could have decided they were good ideas. This is the case with the Biden administration’s nomination of war criminal and convicted misleader of Congress Elliott Abrams to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD).

On the one hand, few people are less appropriate to be appointed to anything related to diplomacy than Abrams, best known for facilitating and covering up many years of grisly human rights atrocities racked up over the course of the Reagan administration’s covert wars on the Left in Central America. As career foreign services officer Frank McNeil put it, Abrams “practices the Doberman Pinscher school of diplomacy.”

On the other hand, the ACPD doesn’t have that much to do with diplomacy anyway: “public diplomacy” is a Cold War–era euphemism for US government propaganda efforts aimed at foreign populations via vehicles like the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, or the Cuba-targeting Radio Martí, which was envisioned as an affordable way to try and destabilize the Fidel Castro government. In that sense, it’s a perfect fit for Abrams, who views himself as a lifelong counterrevolutionary devoted to opposing leftism in any form.