John Lennon and Paul McCartney asked, "Who is it for?"
That's what I want to know about the last two paragraphs in a dispatch from Congress that appeared last night in the NYT. To hear them tell it, the NYT is in the business of selling advertising and producing "great journalism". Yet, the two paragraphs quoted below do nothing to advance either goal.
Republicans argue that the Obama administration has itself delayed elements of the law. They say that at a minimum it should be postponed for a year to eliminate what they see as bureaucratic problems and harmful consequences for businesses and individuals. Republicans also say they have compromised by retreating from their insistence that all money be stripped from the health law.
Democrats say Republicans are being driven by the most extreme elements of their party to use the federal budget to extract concessions on health care that they could not win through the traditional legislative process. But with the government poised for a shutdown, no one in Congress seemed to know how or when the showdown would end. “The scary thing about the period we’re in right now is there is no clear end,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.
It is beyond human imagination to envision the audience for this crap. Readers like me read the NYT to learn facts about the world, but these are 200 words without a single fact. They exist because someone at the Times is concerned about accusations of "liberal media bias", but no one who complains about liberal media bias would be satisfied by the content here. And that assumes that such people ever read paragraphs 14 and 15 of a NYT story!
Hell, the people who complain about liberal media bias haven't read 14 paragraphs of anything in their lives! They are professional ignoramuses.
Do printed words strung together on a page constitute "writing" if it is logically impossible to conceive of a reader who would get any utility from reading them?