The New York Times is doing their crappy ‘normalization’ nonsense. This time it’s about the Republican threat to default. The Times editors work themselves silly pretending that Republicans are just a normal party. No matter how nonsensical or damaging, if Republicans do it, the Times pretends that’s just political back-and-forth.
Start with the Times categorization: The Debt Ceiling Standoff. Calling it a ‘standoff’ is an easy but misleading cliché. No, we don’t have two political parties suggesting different legislative solutions to an issue. This is a Republican threat to knife the country’s economy. Blackmail would be aa giant step closer to the point and a ton more accurate than the half-lying ‘’standoff.’
Today’s article is Debt Default Would Cripple U.S. Economy, New Analysis Warns. That warning comes from the chief economists of Moody’s Analytics, which the Times summarizes:
The damage could spiral to seven million jobs lost and a 2008-style financial crisis in the event of a prolonged breach of the debt limit, in which House Republicans refuse for months to join Democrats in voting to raise the cap, Mr. Zandi and his colleagues Cristian deRitis and Bernard Yaros wrote in an analysis prepared for the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy.
New York Times, “Debt Default Would Cripple U.S. Economy, New Analysis Warns,” Mar. 7, 2023.
No surprise, right? That prediction matches what most economists have been saying since… well, forever. So here’s the Times quoting another prominent economist saying the same thing: the Republican’s threatened default would be horrible for us. You’d think it wouldn’t require much analysis to know where the threat is coming from, right?
But here’s the very next paragraph:
The warning comes at a moment of fiscal brinkmanship. House Republicans are demanding deep spending cuts from President Biden in exchange for voting to raise the debt limit, which caps how much money the government can borrow.
ibid
Fucking passive-voiced “fiscal brinkmanship”? How stout and brave of the Times not to include the subject.
But the meat is their intentional blindness. “House Republicans are demanding deep spending cuts…” Really? Fucking really? ‘Cause last I looked, Republicans had no demands. And it’s not like nobody’s asking. Dems are demanding their terms for release. The news media routinely ask Republican politicians for examples of programs they’d cut. But the official Republican position remains “We’re not sayin’!” It’s been that way for weeks. The Times published lots of articles about the Republican silence, so it’s not as if they don’t know. “Demanding deep cuts” is utter horseshit.
So, here’s my real question: Why? Does the Times screw this up because they’re so unaware that they don’t notice their stilted coverage? Or is this something worse? Is the vaunted Grey Lady afraid that if they don’t bow and scrape to Republicans, the party of feverish thugs will retaliate? (Which they totally would.)
I don’t believe that the celebrated New Times editors are stupid. But that leaves cowardice as the explanation. They’re hiding the truth, so the violent and abusive GOP will leave them alone for a little while longer. Yes, abuse looks just like that.
If that’s true – if the New York Times is soft-pedaling its reporting to avoid Republican retribution, they’re following the cowardly examples of the FBI, the DOJ, and most police departments.
This is the sound of our democracy dying.
