Just in time for Halloween and the congressional midterm elections, The New York Times wallops readers with a front-page story about GOP “devil terms.” Times reporters sifted through millions of documents to prove that Republicans “used divisive words and phrases more than twice as often as Democrats in tweets.” The Times article, the latest in its “Democracy Challenged” series, revealed that devil words are “things that are so unquestionably bad that you can’t have a debate about them,” according to Texas A&M University professor Jennifer Mercieca. Political rhetoric has certainly become more polarized, if not depraved, in recent years. But...