CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was anchoring the network’s breaking news coverage Thursday afternoon on the possible radical Islamic terror attack in Barcelona, Spain when he made the inartful and arguably pathetic assertion that the truck attack could be “a copycat” of the neo-Nazi car attack on Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Former Obama administration official and CNN correspondent Jim Sciutto actually laid out the recent rap sheet of ISIS and Islamic terror attacks across Europe (including Nice and Belgium) with Spain being a country featuring a less-known track record of problems that France and Belgium have had.

Sciutto brought the matter back to Charlottesville, but only from the standpoint of how that also involved a vehicle:

And the final point I would make, Wolf, is just know that, in light of the uproar over the last several days, five days apart you have whites supremacists in Charlottesville use a vehicle to kill and here you have — attackers at least following the modus operandi of terrorists using vehicles apparently to kill as well and that — those shared tactics that should be alarming.

Blitzer’s word choice could obviously have been better, but it was nonetheless a head-scratching statement when he responded that “there will be questions about copycats” of Charlottesville.

What made his rhetoric even more absurd was that he immediately doubled down [emphasis mine]:

There will be questions, if not what happened in Barcelona, was at all, at all, a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. Even though they may be different characters and different political ambitions, they use the same killing device. A vehicle going at high speed into a group, a large group, of pedestrians and as local police are saying, at least one person is now dead. 32 injured. Many of them in critical condition right now.

It’s clear that the news media want to capitalize on Charlottesville, but perhaps they should leave this horrifying event aside for the moment. Connecting something on the other side of the world likely done by Islamists who are far different than neo-Nazis other than the key point that they’re anti-Semitic is a stretch.

Here’s the relevant transcript from CNN’s Wolf on August 17: