Talk about burying the lead—or “lede” as our journalist friends waggishly prefer to spell it. Here’s the Washington Post headline to a story, by Toluse Olorunnipa and Matt Zapotosky, about Andrew McCabe’s revelation on national television (on the eve of Presidents’ Day!) of what amounted to a projected coup d’état in 2017 by himself and an anti-Trump faction of the fbi and the Justice Department against the newly elected president by invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment’s provisions for presidential incapacity: “Trump trains his sights on McCabe as the Mueller report on Russian interference looms.”

Of course, it wasn’t surprising that, to the Post, there was nothing to see here in what, in other times and under other presidents, might have looked to a real newspaper like the scoop of the decade, if not the century. Even an embryonic conspiracy by high-ranking officials of the federal police force to remove a duly elected president from office, on the grounds that he hypothetically could have been a Russian operative, might have been taken to confirm the impression, so often conveyed by our legal and political wranglings these days, that we have become, politically at least, a third world country. For what was frightening wasn’t so much that Mr. McCabe and his co-conspirators thought about contriving to rid themselves of this turbulent billionaire as that he obviously expected his confession to redound to his credit—and that it probably did, too, where it was not simply greeted with