On Saturday the New York Times published the newspaper’s opinion on the front page. Here are some excerpts:

With striking unanimity . . . the rising tide of bellicosity gripped the Republican presidential field. . . . Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seethed with disgust for Democrats. . . . Their language was almost apocalyptic. . . . Republicans showed little patience for such nuance. . . . For all the heated expressions from Republicans, there emerged no real detailed consensus among them about how to destroy the Islamic State or stop it from inspiring future adherents in the United States. . . . They favored symbolism over specific policy prescriptions. . . . Republican voters are flocking not to the candidate with the most experience managing national security, but to an outsider with no government résumé. . . . [David Gergen] added: “It’s almost animalistic. The human instinct is to seek safety.”

The last time the paper published an opinion on the front page was on Friday.

Also on Saturday, the Times admitted to publishing opinion on the front page: a signed editorial titled “The Gun Epidemic” (online “End the Gun Epidemic in America”). That was unusual; the last time the Times ran a formal editorial on the front page was in 1920. It disparaged the presidential nomination of Warren Harding as “the fine and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the Senatorial cabal that charged itself with the management of the Republican Convention.”

Saturday’s editorial—pegged to Wednesday’s terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.—began as follows:

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But . . .

You may ask: Why spend the first paragraph stating the obvious when the point of the editorial—signaled by that “But . . .”—is its antithesis? Because the Times is walking back this embarrassingly wrong assertion, from an editorial two days earlier: “There will be post-mortems and an official search for a ‘motive’ for this latest gun atrocity, as if something explicable had happened.”