The Wall Street Journal‘s editors messed this one up, badly, in two ways.
One is their blithe insistence that, as their headline put it, [t]he conspiracists on the right and left deserve to be ostracized. How do these august ones propose to identify conspiracists and their conspiracies in real time? The conspiracies painting the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian fakery were taken as gospel in real time. The conspiracies concerning a variety of Wuhan Virus vaccine side effects turned out to have considerable substance. The conspiracies concerning 2020 election cheating are turning out to have considerable substance.
And there’s this:
Congressman Mike Collins, Republican from Georgia’s 10th district, who sent a tweet on Saturday that “Joe Biden sent the orders.”
It’s hard to imagine a more incendiary message in the wake of an assassination attempt. Mr Collins was retweeting and amplifying a tweet that quoted President Biden’s remark last week that “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Mr Biden was employing a metaphor, however inapt given our current political distemper.
Collins’ amplification certainly was untoward. However, Biden was not at all speaking metaphorically with his put a bullseye on Trump instruction to his minions. He was every bit as literal and direct as the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ claim that then-President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech to his supporters in which he told them to go to the capital and fight for their election rights was an incitement to riot and insurrection. What those wonders have ignored all along is that Trump explicitly enjoined his supporters to fight peacefully. Biden, on the other hand, issued no instruction to his supporters that they should be peaceful with their bullseye.
The editors very carefully ignored all of that.
A bonus editorial “error:”
Mr Collins is among those who think Mr Biden lacks the mental acuity to be President, but he then accuses him of masterminding a conspiracy.
There’s nothing at all inconsistent in that. Leading such a plot, were Biden actually doing so, would be pretty dispositive evidence of his incapacity.