It was interesting to watch the GOP excuses develop around the SignalGate group chat. If you’ve been under a rock, this is where top US officials were discussing war plans and Waltz had somehow added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief from the Atlantic, to the chat.

First they attacked the reporter saying he was pond scum, an overall bad and disreputable person.

Then they tried “he just did it for the publicity.”

Then there were some semantics issues as to whether it was “war plans” or somehow just “attack plans” which aren’t as confidential. Or something.

Somewhere along the way they acknowledged that it had actually happened. But then suggested that it was part of a coordinated effort to distract from Trump’s agenda.

And of course it was called a “witch hunt” even though it was pretty clear that the incident actually occurred and that sensitive information was leaked.

Then they seemed to coalesce around how bad Biden had bungled that Afghan withdrawal a number of years ago. And that at least SignalGate wasn’t as bad.

And lots of other angles were tried with even Trump himself, who’s never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, suggesting a woman at NPR was somehow involved. Even though Waltz had already taken responsibility, that a Waltz staffer had performed the add.

Regarding what appears to have ended up as the main response: the Afghan withdrawal was supposed to have taken place during Trump’s first term. But he figured out it was likely to go sideways and kicked the can so that Biden would be left holding the bag. And that left Biden scrambling to get it done as the Afghan war had pretty well cratered in terms of popular support. It was way past due to withdraw from that long, expensive war.

In any case, SignalGate was an epic fail and it only takes a modicum of common sense to read the now-published posts and understand that the information being shared was extremely sensitive. This was a misstep of the first order, but of course if Trump had handled the Afghan withdrawal that would have been smooth. And if only they had used the Cone of Silence.