Just days after former Secretary of State Colin Powell went on television to talk about (among other things) his endorsement of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal implied that Powell is an anti-Semite on the flimsiest of evidence.

Bret Stephens, a deputy editor at the Journal, doesn’t outright say that Powell is anti-Semitic. Instead, in a manner reminiscent of Glenn Beck’s “I’m just asking questions!” tactic for avoiding responsibility for his nonsense, Stephens strings together two statements of Powell’s to suggest he has a track record of anti-Semitism:

OK, I get it. An errant slip of the tongue isn’t proof of prejudice. We have all said things the offensiveness of which we perhaps didn’t fully appreciate when we opened our mouth.

Like the time when, according to Bob Woodward, Mr. Powell accused Douglas Feith, one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the Bush administration and the son of a Holocaust survivor, of running a “Gestapo office” out of the Pentagon. Mr. Powell later apologized personally to Mr. Feith for what he acknowledged was a “despicable characterization.”

Or the time when, according to George Packer in his book “The Assassins’ Gate,” Mr. Powell leveled another ugly charge at Mr. Feith, this time in his final Oval Office meeting with George W. Bush. “The Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy, [Powell] argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department’s number three official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of the Likud Party.”

The implication of this is that Powell has a pattern of anti-Semitic behavior. While Stephens never owns that this is, in fact what he’s implying, it’s hard not to see the suggestion (which is, of course, baseless).

Stephens might protest that he’s simply attempting to point out the alleged absurdity of Powell’s claim that several remarks by leading Republicans show that there’s a “a dark vein of intolerance” running through the GOP. Set aside, for the moment, that Powell’s examples are substantially more well-grounded than Stephens’. Were that the columnist’s point, then he would be repudiating his own case that Hagel is suffused by the “odor” of anti-Semitism, an argument built solely on the same sort of quotes he says Powell is wrong for using. So either a) Stephens should admit that the GOP emits the “odor” of racism, or b) he should retract and apologize for his own insinuations about Hagel (which others have done him the courtesy of taking apart).

There’s also an amusing implication in the column that the only lobby anyone ever suggests “intimidates” people is the so-called Israel Lobby. Stephens’ evidence for this strange claim is his own Google searches for “the farm lobby intimidates,” “the African-American lobby intimidates,” or “the Hispanic lobby intimidates.” Even accepting the idea that two seconds of Google work counts as evidence, one might suggest Stephens search for “the NRA intimidates” or the “the AARP intimidates.” He might be surprised at the results.

Stephens himself suggested that Hagel is anti-Semitic but pleaded on Sunday that he made no such charge. But Stephens isn’t the only accuser of Hagel’s to run into trouble recently. Elliott Abrams, a former Bush official and Paul Ryan adviser whose charge of anti-Semitism against Hagel was far more overt, has been roundly condemned, including by his own boss.

Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell endorsed President Obama’s re-election campaign this morning on CBS This Morning. Powell — who served as the top U.S. diplomat during the Bush administration — said the president would be better on the economy but he also had harsh criticism of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy, reiterating his concern about Romney’s neocon advisers and that the GOP presidential nominee essentially threw out all his past hawkish positions and played a moderate during this week’s foreign policy debate:

POWELL: Not only am I uncomfortable with what Governor Romney is proposing for his economic plan, I have concerns about his views on foreign policy. The governor who was speaking on Monday night at the debate was saying things that were quite different from what he said earlier so I’m not quite sure which governor Romney we would be getting with respect to foreign policy.

O’DONNELL: What concerns do you have with governor Romney’s foreign policy?

POWELL: Well it’s hard to fix it, I mean it’s a moving target, one day he has a certain strong view about staying in Afghanistan but then on Monday night he agrees with the withdrawal, the same thing in Iraq and almost every issue that was discussed on Monday night, governor Romney agreed with the president with some nuances but this is quite a different set of foreign policy views than he had earlier in the campaign and my concern which I’ve expressed previously in a public way is that sometimes I don’t sense he has thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have and he gets advice from his campaign staff that he then has to adjust or modify as they go along.

ROSE: Are you concerned about the people that are advising governor Romney?

POWELL: I think there are some very very strong neoconservative views that are presented by the governor that I have some trouble with.

Watch the clip:

Back in May, Powell took issue with Romney’s characterization of Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” “Come on Mitt,” Powell said, “think.” The former Secretary of State also said at the time that he was concerned with who is advising Romney on foreign policy. “I’ve seen some of the names and some of them are quite far to the right and sometimes I think they might be in a position to make judgements or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” he said.

But Powell noticed the obvious during the presidential foreign policy debate this week. The Mitt Romney whose “instinct is to call to the Cheney-ites” on foreign policy issues was nowhere to be found. “Despite Romney’s momentary embrace of President Obama’s policies [during the debate],” CAP’s Matt Duss wrote this week, “we should still be concerned with the role that neoconservatives would play in a Romney administration.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) appeared on CNN this morning and discussed Mitt Romney’s campaign trip abroad. An early Romney endorser, Chaffetz was asked about Romney’s recent remark that Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe.”

Chaffetz told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that Romney was right: Russia is “absolutely” the U.S.’s top geopolitical adversary before O’Brien bails him out by mentioning other top U.S. adversaries:

O’BRIEN: Here’s what Governor Romney said to Wolf Blitzer on March 26: Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.” Do you think that is true? Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe”?

CHAFFETZ: Well, as you look at behind the scenes what’s going on — and how they support terrorism; how they supported some of the worst actors in the world, including Iran; if you look at what’s going on in the cyber-security front, some of the classified briefings we hear there — absolutely.

O’BRIEN: Worse than North Korea? Worse than Iran? Worse than China?

CHAFFETZ: Well, look, those are probably your top three. But certainly you cannot dismiss the Russians even though sometimes they stay out of the news.

Watch the video:

Romney’s comment about Russia drew widespread, bipartisan ridicule. Former George W. Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the remark as a “cataclysmic sort of pronouncements,” and called on Romney to be more “mature.” Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said the comment was “naïve.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a Romney supporter, dodged a question about the comment. A Russian politician, for his part, said Romney’s comment could portend “a full-scale crisis” in relations should he be elected president.

On an Obama campaign conference call Monday, former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy said that while “everyone recognizes that the relations with Russia will be difficult” at times, the Russians have helped the U.S. in international coalitions against Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs — a fact noted by the Washington Post when it described Romney’s “number one geopolitical foe” remark as “puzzling.” Flournoy went on to say: “Frankly, we woudln’t be able to sustain this cooperation if we go back to the Cold War and treat russia as our biggest enemy in the world.”

CNN’s Will Cain asked Chaffetz about the Syrian civil war, where Russia supports Bashar al-Assad’s embattled government. Cain asked for “some specifics”: “How would [Romney] handle the situation in Syria were he president?” Chaffetz responded that Romney would “work very closely with” and “strengthen” Israel.

This morning on MSNBC, former Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team for being “quite far to the right.” Romney has been “catching a lot of heck from the more regular GOP foreign affairs community. We’re kind of taken aback by it,” Powell said.

Later on the same network, the retried four-star U.S. Army general, referring to Romney’s claim that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” had some advice for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee — cut out the hyperbole when talking about foreign policy:

POWELL: I think he really needs to not just accept these cataclysmic sort of pronouncements. I think he really needs to think carefully about these statements because they’re now on the wall for people to see. … Let’s not go creating enemies where none yet exist. Does this mean that we should trust Putin or Medvedev? No. Let’s be mature people and look at the reality of the situation and not find ways to see if we can hyperbolize the situation.

Host Andrea Mitchell noted that Romney is attacking President Obama on his Iran policy, saying he’s “showing weakness.”

“Well I don’t know what Mr. Romney would prefer to do,” Powell said, “The fact of the matter is we need a negotiated solution and the only way you can get a negotiated solution is to talk to the other side.” Watch the clip:

Vice President Biden also recently chastised Romney for his militaristic rhetoric. “[L]oose talk about a war has incredibly negative consequences in our efforts to end Iran’s nuclear quest,” he said, adding that if war with Iran is “what governor Romney means by a ‘very different policy’ then he should tell the American people.”

And if Powell doesn’t know “what Mr. Romney would prefer to do” on Iran, as he said today on MSNBC, neither does anyone else. Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. The New York Times reported recently that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”