The headline for this New York Times piece by David W. Chen (“Crime Festers in Republican States While Their Troops Patrol Washington”) was sharper than I’ve come to expect from the newspaper. I anticipated a piece deeply critical of the administration’s obvious pretense that “high crime rates” in D.C. and other “blue cities” were a legitimate justification for deploying (or threatening to deploy) armed National Guard troops to them, when many “red cities” had equally high (or higher) crime rates. I contemplated a condemnation of the conspicuous fiction, and a call for the deployments to end.

But it’s the New York Times, so instead we got the same mealy-mouthed, what’s-good-for-the-goose bothsiderism they’ve been publishing for years:

When Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington to support President Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines.

Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics. Nashville has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well.

The same questions could be asked of other Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas, Mike DeWine in Ohio and Mike Kehoe in Missouri, since cities under their purview all have higher rates of violent crime than the nation’s capital. Yet no Republican governor has asked for federal intervention.

In pretending to question the “high crimes” rationale for deploying the National Guard to blue cities, and suggesting they should be equally welcome in high-crime red cities, the Times is normalizing the idea of armed military—which Chen dismissively calls “supplementary forces”—patrolling American streets.

This will have the far right salivating: Yes, you’re right, they’ll nod thoughtfully. We should deploy troops to other cities, in a totally nonpartisan way. Even the liberal New York Times thinks it’s a great idea.

I’m used to headlines inaccurately reflecting the stories they top, but usually it’s the headlines that are terrible. Here we get a strong headline and an awful article.

Instead of fighting creeping fascism, this framing from the Times enables it.