Had Saturday’s assassination attempt been carried out against President Joe Biden, we have no doubt we would have read about how the right’s dangerous rhetoric was behind it. We are old enough to remember more than a decade back when former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s use of crosshairs imagery to identify congressional districts—or, as the Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, "extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery"—was fingered as an incitement for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s (D., Ariz.) shooter. (He was, in fact, a deranged individual with no discernible motivation, political or otherwise.)