To his credit, Joe Biden made yet another attempt to salvage his candidacy by sitting down for an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt last night. And to Holt's credit, he didn't shy away from some tougher questions, or at least not entirely. Biden's performance was still a bit on the rough side, though he seems a bit more at ease despite ongoing "private efforts" by members of his own party to "nudge" him out of the race. Things got a bit dicey, however, when Holt asked Biden about his recent comments saying that he needed to put Donald Trump "in a bullseye" and if that might have been a mistake since a madman did precisely that (literally) on Saturday evening. Biden made a couple of attempts at defending his remarks, but let's just say that it didn't go well. (NY Post)

President Biden appeared to defend saying that Democrats should put Donald Trump in a “bullseye” less than a week before the former president was shot, saying “I didn’t say crosshairs.”

“I was talking about ‘focus on,'” the 81-year-old president told NBC anchor Lester Holt in an interview Monday.

“Look, the truth of the matter was, what I guess I was talking about at the time was there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.”

Before getting to Biden's rather lame attempt at a defense, let's start off by acknowledging that this never should have been an issue, to begin with. He was obviously speaking metaphorically and everyone with the common sense that God gave a chicken should know it. But the Democrats are the ones who set up the rules for this game, dating back at least to their scathing criticism of Sarah Palin for posting a map with some crosshairs on it. She clearly wasn't identifying literal targets for physical attacks, but that's how the left decided to run with it, so here we are.

Biden almost seemed to be invoking the Palin brouhaha when he first attempted to say that he didn't say "crosshairs." Of course, that's a rather nonsensical answer in this context. The crosshairs are located on the weapon. They can be pointed anywhere. The bullseye is on the target, and that's where you intend the bullet to go. No matter which word you invoke, it can be taken as a reference to firing a weapon. And Thomas Crooks came within centimeters of making that a reality. 

Biden next attempted to clarify that he was simply talking about "focusing on" Trump. Of course, that's all Sarah Palin was doing with the crosshairs on her map. As I said... we didn't make these rules. We're just playing by them. Biden didn't help matters by expanding on that and claiming that "there was very little focus on Trump's agenda." What a completely ludicrous statement. Biden and the Democrats are the ones who don't bring up Trump's agenda because Biden's own agenda has been such an unprecedented disaster while Trump's actually succeeded. All Trump talks about for the most part is his agenda, though he does spice it up a bit with comments about "Crooked Joe Biden" and the Biden crime family. 

When Holt interrupted Biden to remind him that he literally used the word "bullseye," that was when Biden seemed to lose the thread yet again. He began suggesting that his language had been a "mistake" before trailing off in midsentence and returning to his insistence that "bullseye" wasn't as bad as "crosshairs." The entire exchange was a mess. If anything good came out of this interview for Biden, it was the fact that fewer people are talking about chasing him out of the race this week or his disastrous debate performance. But it doesn't sound like that situation will last for long once the investigation into the assassination attempt wraps up.