The utter debacle in Afghanistan is Joe Biden's blunder and responsibility, which is no reason for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be governor of Arkansas, though she's offered few others.
Yes, the American failure in Afghanistan began two decades ago when an appropriate retaliation against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida got turned into long-term nation-building to try to keep the religiously extreme Taliban from running things.
Yes, Donald Trump wanted the United States out and called for it to happen by this past May.
Yes, just over a month ago, Trump was crowing about having forced Biden to accept the Afghanistan withdrawal that Trump now indicts Biden for blowing.
But the simple fact is that these images of an instantly triumphant Taliban insurrection upon America's withdrawal--and of desperate Afghans trying in vain to find American rescue--are happening on Biden's watch and by circumstances of his creation.
General blame for this debacle is widespread and historic. Specific blame goes to the specific current president. To his credit, Biden stands up and says, yes, he did it, and, debacle aside, would again.
What Sarah Sanders has to do with it--other than nothing--is that she couldn't resist taking to her Twitter feed over the weekend and on Monday to say, "It's a humiliating disgrace what's happening in America and our leadership position in the world under Joe Biden," and, "There is nothing Biden can say now to right the wrong of his failed policy."
Basically she was saying that, as governor of Arkansas, she'd never do Afghans the dirty way Biden has done them.
What she'll do to or for Arkansans ... who knows?
You can argue her points on Biden and Afghanistan, though I'm not in any mood. The issue is that, in full context, Sanders is not a qualified or substantive candidate for governor, but a career political operative.
These anti-Biden tweets continued her pattern of talking as a candidate for governor of Arkansas not about Arkansas issues, but only national ones, and only in a stridently partisan and never thoughtful way.
Her most recent Twitter posts--her campaign pronouncements to date, such as they are--amount to poll-driven chunks of red meat hurled at the ravenous Trump-fueled resentment conservatism that currently seems to rule Arkansas.
It's smart tactical politics on her part. It's also shameless divisiveness and the antithesis of the locally focused leadership that Arkansas should, and once did, expect of its governors.
Sanders is not discussing the Delta outbreak in the state or the school mask controversy or anything having to do with the real and occasionally daunting job she seeks.
That's except that she wrote an op-ed guest column--safe from local-media engagement, which she eschews as a needless risk--saying that she got vaccinated but wouldn't presume to tell anyone else to do so, but that more people would have gotten vaccinated if Democrats had given Trump credit for the vaccine.
Otherwise, her social media fixation is hard partisan attacks on Democrats on national issues except for an occasional reference to a nice turnout for a campaign event and to retweet a jolly woo-pig exhortation from Razorback football coach Sam Pittman on the start of practice.
So far, then, Huckabee's Arkansas gubernatorial campaign's platform is go Hogs, go Trump and down with Biden and Kamala Harris and all that supposed open-border, defund-the-police, Afghanistan-betraying, America-hating wokeness and socialism.
None of that has anything to do with the kinds of challenges a governor faces. None of it gives voters any idea how she would handle the specific job for which Arkansas taxpayers would hire her--a chief executive job for which even the most competently hardened career political operative is wholly inexperienced.
A candidate for governor needs good campaign operatives. But the campaign operatives shouldn't become governors. They should move on to control the message and stymie the genuine soul of the next client.
Sanders next career step ought to be to perfect-fitting consultancy to Ron DeSantis, not the Arkansas Governor's Mansion.
I'd say it would be back to service to Trump, but she's never left that.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.