Sorry for all the NYT links, but it’s pretty interesting to watch this slow-mo editorial wreck unfold. Today’s installment: “Mr. Trump’s phone call also violated a longstanding principle of American policy: that the president does not speak to the head of Taiwan’s government.” Except he’s not president yet — Obama is, remember? I get the waning-days adjustment and that the writer was saving that minor detail for the punchline, but it’s a bad joke. This kind of basic factual slippage is symptomatic of the same kind of drift that led to NYT’s morbid fascination with (for example) ‘millennials’ and ‘Bernie bros,’ as well as its loss of perspective in covering HRC — the email server, the Clinton Foundation, and Comey. IOW, it’s part of a deep, almost visceral attraction to power — which these days is a very dangerous thing. People like to use the word ‘normalize,’ but that doesn’t capture some of the subtleties of how institutions sleepwalk into authoritarianism.
(NYT)