The New York Times carried a “guest essay” by Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson Tuesday, arguing that the main reason voters are mad at Joe Biden and giving him low approval ratings is that he promised to end the chaos and craziness of the Trump years, but here we are three years into Biden’s presidency and everything still feels chaotic, so where’s our normality?
It’s not an entirely crazy argument, although Anderson leaves out the tiny detail that much of the chaos of late has come from the Republican-controlled House constantly threatening to crash the economy or shut down the government, along with the sense that there are no adults over there at all.
Anderson contends all the fuck-tussle and hullabaloo offers Donald Trump the chance to appeal to voters’ nostalgia for the good old days when things were nicer and gas was two dollars a gallon, because maybe enough voters will also forget that half a million Americans were dying in an uncontrolled pandemic and a historic recession when gas was that cheap. It’s plausible, unfortunately. Now Americans can sort of understand why some East Germans missed the certainty and stability of Soviet times.
When Trump talks about bringing stability and order to America, he means something like that, or at least the hooray Russia part. He insists he’ll only need to be a dictator for one day while he fixes everything. He said he only needed a day to fix everything in 2016, too, minus the dictator stuff, which was only implied.
That said the idea of Donald Trump selling his burn-everything-down clownshow as the alternative to “chaos” isn’t terribly convincing, particularly on the same day the Great Calmer pooted out a social media post featuring a word cloud with revenge, dictatorship, nothing, and dictator taking prominence, along with magic happy words like power, economy, and america.
In any case, we’re less interested in Anderson’s column than in the the evolving headline the Times slapped on it. (Yes, go ahead and go Pthbbbpppt! at us for the 350 words we did spend on the column.) Here’s the invaluable “Editing the Gray Lady” Xitter account to track how the headline changed.
That’s pretty cute, really, going from the Biden-bashing “Could Voters Conclude That Biden Is the Riskier Bet to Restore Order?” to the almost painfully bland “How Trump Is Running Differently This Time.”
We can only assume that someone at the Times looked at the first version of the headline — which, frankly, reflects Anderson’s point more accurately, and recalled Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
As British tech journo Ian Betteridge added when he came up with it in 2009, “The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don't actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.”
In this case, it’s not actually an article, but an opinion column, but the point is pretty much the same — especially when the question so bluntly asks the reader to consider Joe Biden as an agent of chaos compared to the guy facing 91 felony indictments. Faced with that, it made far better sense to go with the opinion column equivalent of “Our Friend the Beaver,” the end.
[NYT / Editing the Gray Lady on Twitter / Base photo of Times building by Wally Gobetz, Creative Commons License 2.0, modified by DreamStudio AI then collaged using Photoshop]
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I had fun doing the illustration. Started with a plain Creative Commons photo* of the Times building facade, then ran it though DreamStudio AI using the "neon punk" filter, then photoshooped a whole bunch of mangled AI versions from the results into one pic.
by Wally Gobetz, https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/2259318046
“ Anderson contends all the fuck-tussle and hullabaloo offers Donald Trump the chance to appeal to voters’ nostalgia for the good old days when things were nicer and gas was two dollars a gallon, because maybe enough voters will also forget that half a million Americans were dying in an uncontrolled pandemic and a historic recession when gas was that cheap.”
It’s such a Republican centric view of things to look back to 2017 -2020 wistfully. I for one remember Monday-Thursday of every single GD week during that time being an endless nightmare of “some half-thought policy of stupidity that violated several constitutional provisions and conventions against human rights abuses”, followed by discourse being dominated almost exclusively about Donald Trump’s crayon scribbles of the day.
Remember the Muslim ban? Remember family separation, followed by all of the Nazis making a big show of eating out at Mexican restaurants? Remember Mike Pence going to NFL games and making a big show of walking out at anthem protests? Remember when the president of the United States gave a speech about shining UV lights inside one’s body?
Yes things are far crazier now……..🙄