I don't see that as uncivil or a personal attack. It's either a reasonable direct question or a rhetorical one. And as a rhetorical question, it's not a personal attack, but rather makes the point that other posts seem to damage his credibility.
It's obviously not a direct question (there are people defending him in this thread, so of course he "believes" that), and as a rhetorical one it implies that he is lying. That's not a civil debate tactic—there's a reason why parliamentary systems expel people for using it.
Everyone needs to err in favor of respect when addressing someone on the other side of an argument, especially when one's passions are agitated, because the default is to forget all that.
OH COME ON Dang, Alex called up Wes's employer and threatened him with criminal charges and then had the balls to lie about it in his facebook post that he didn't "Threaten". Are you seriously defending this??
Asking HN users to be civil defends nothing except civility.
There's a relevant general point here though. Reactions like this, and many others in this thread, are reflexive. That's really not what this site is for. Good comments for HN aren't reflexive, they're reflective. Practicing that distinction is the most important thing for being a contributor here, and it's orthogonal to one's actual views.
Asking HN users to be civil defends nothing except civility.
This would only be true if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil. As it stands, it does generally come off as defending specific users.
...it's orthogonal to one's actual views.
Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator -- this is "fair and balanced"-style thinking. There are many perspectives whose projection onto comment reflectivity are anything but zero.
> if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil
That's asking us to operate like machines—supermachines, in fact, with incivility detection and moderation powers. That's unrealistic. HN users' capacity to be uncivil exceeds our capacity to ask them not to, so the latter maxes out.
> it does generally come off as defending specific users
We try hard not to play favorites. I'm biased, of course, but there's more than one kind of bias here. People are more likely to notice us criticizing a comment they identify with than the cases that go the other way. We're biased to notice what we dislike and assign more weight to it.
> Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator
In that case I'm a bad moderator already, because everything I've learned about HN is packed into what I said there.
Personal attacks, which this crosses into, are not allowed on Hacker News. Please comment civilly or not at all.