Okay, well I guess I obsessed too much on the Dowd-Obama feud, huh?

This is now, potentially, a political problem for President Biden. Those headlines are baad. The political problem for the president is captured in the economical Times headline "Taliban Seizes, U.S. Scrambles". The Biden administration, the president personally, the White House, the Defense Department, the State Department, our intel services did not see this coming. As a dyed-blue Democrat and Biden admirer I am thoroughly embarrassed. Never in a zillion years would I have thought that a foreign policy incompetence disaster would occur under Biden, not Trump. The failure to anticipate is unmitigated incompetence. You cannot sell the evacuation as competent and Biden shouldn't even try. 

The policy to leave Afghanistan was correct, Republicans cannot politically capitalize because their master Trump had the same pro-withdrawal policy. In fact, he praised Biden's decision to withdraw. Republicans can't capitalize on the shocking rise in COVID-Delta cases since they are pro-COVID.

Thus Republicans have an exceedingly narrow path to political capitalization on both issues. It lies on competence. Now how they gonna do that with Trump their Leader? "We would have injected bleach!" "We would have withdrawn better!" Curb your enthusiasm. Even if Republicans had a plausible alternative to Biden, incompetence is a concept and it is vague and Americans are not concept people and we don't like nuance. The last major candidate to stake his campaign on competence was Michael Dukakis and he got clobbered. Americans are a visual people, though. We like movies, books with lots of pictures, picto-magazines. I have not read the Times article nor seen photographs but God help the president if the images resemble the U.S. evacuation from Vietnam in 1975, or of Desert One, the failed rescue by President Carter of the U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980. A humiliated America will turn to any alternative.