SPARE A THOUGHT FOR OUR NEEDIEST:

The notion that a laptop delivered to the Post by Rudy Giuliani two weeks before the election and rejected by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others should not have been treated skeptically is the dicier proposition. Further, the hyperventilating about the assault this represents on the First Amendment is risible. Twitter, a private company, was free to ignore the request. Even if Biden had been president at the time, there would be no violation of the First Amendment. Government officials not infrequently request that journalists refrain from publishing material, often about military secrets. Newspapers sometimes comply and sometimes not. It's only a violation of the First Amendment if the government coerces the journalists.

Nor did Twitter's temporary suspension of the Post's account sway the election. As Cathy Young notes, 1) the ban lasted only about 36 hours; 2) the ban may have heightened interest in the story rather than suppressing it, and in any case, the story was available via a Google search; and 3) the whole narrative about Biden's participation in Ukrainian corruption, the gravamen of the laptop story, is false.

So what is this really about? Consider the timing.

For seven years, the right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics. That takes a toll on the psyche. You can tell yourself that the critics are unhinged, suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome," but then Trump will do what he always does -- make a fool of you. You denied that Trump purposely broke the law when he took highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and obstructed every effort to retrieve them. And then what does Trump do? He admits taking them! You scoff at the critics who've compared Trump with Nazis. And then what does he do? He has dinner with Nazis! (And fails to condemn them even after the fact.) You despised people who claimed Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and then Trump explicitly calls for "terminating" the Constitution in order to put himself back in the Oval Office.

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