USA TODAY: Kabul could turn into President Biden’s Katrina if Afghanistan evacuation fails U.S. citizens.

Mission One for any president is the safety of American citizens.

President George W. Bush’s leadership suffered irreparable damage in 2005 when tens of thousands in New Orleans were seemingly abandoned by the federal government after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city.

A dangerous analog is shaping up for President Joe Biden in Kabul and across Afghanistan. There are 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. citizens in homes or hideaways eager to escape. But all that Biden has offered them is this: Take your chances with the Taliban. Venture into the street and make your way to the U.S.-controlled airport in Kabul, which closed Saturday because of a backup at an air base in Qatar. Then we’ll bring you home.

The key word though, in that USA Today editorial is “seemingly.” In 2010, Joseph Campbell explored at his Media Myth Alert blog: Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting.

Few if any of the nightmarish accounts of violence, anarchy, and mayhem proved true.

No shots were fired at rescue helicopters. There were no known child rape victims, no bodies stacked like cordwood, no “bands of rapists going from block to block,” no sharks plying the flood waters.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “the erroneous and exaggerated reporting had the cumulative the effect of painting for America and the rest of the world a scene of surreal violence and terror, something straight out of Mad Max or Lord of the Flies.”

The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath was no “quintessential” great moment in journalism.

Far from it.

As a bipartisan congressional report on Katrina noted in 2006:

“If anyone rioted, it was the media.”

Indeed. Even someone as partisan as former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile ultimately admitted at CNN in 2013, when it was finally safe to do so: Bush came through on Katrina.

In the interim though, her party exploited the chaos manufactured by its operatives with bylines for all it was worth, levering it to capture first both houses of Congress in 2006, and then the White House in 2008.

As it stands now, the only Democratic Party operatives with bylines who are defending Biden’s handling of Afghanistan appear to be doing the same sort of gaslighting the media did with Katrina, except in reverse:

So on brand! Jennifer Rubin dragged for claiming ‘ignorant public’ is to blame for being too stupid to understand Biden’s #Afghanistan strategy.

Joe Scarborough tells Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Vietnamese refugee to ‘please don’t embarrass yourself by comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam.’

The Talking Points Go Forth on Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster.

But the Katrina analogy could be correct in one sense: Dire Polling For Democrats Shows Voters Fleeing Them In Droves.

Don’t get cocky, though. As Glenn has written, “If you want to win, donate and volunteer. Winning takes work, and commenting on Internet blogs, even this one, doesn’t count.”

UPDATE: Byron York: A National Eye-Opening On Joe Biden.