I’m just envisioning Trump coming over to Biden’s makeup/prep room, whatever they get, before the debate to say good luck in private and just let him know it’s nothing personal between them. While they’re chatting Biden is getting layers upon layers of makeup caked on and Trump is just nervously inching closer and closer to Joe’s water bottle with a tiny bottle of visine eye drops. Just enough to fuck him up and counteract the speedball.
Pretty sure OP knows that. The point is how burger-brained it is that everything in the US is like this to some degree or another. In a proper society no serious newspaper would be reporting this in a serious way. They would just cite relevant governmental agency data and releases.
Like many things that are wrong with borger-land it’s these seemingly innocuous reports or statements that add up to reflect serious underlying issues. In this case, over reliance on private institutions versus appropriate, existing public institutions. Also it seems to indicate mistrust in the “simple facts” that even agencies like FEMA or NOAA get right (for the most part). Some section of society, growing it seems, are incapable of discerning the facts put out by government agencies vs the bullshit that government agencies put out. For example, NOAA is probably not bullshitting people, while anything coming from the DoD regarding anything foreign affairs related, is 99% bullshit or bullshit-adjacent. People with a teenager’s critical thinking capacity should be able to pick apart the daily lies but also see the truths reported by other agencies.
Of course this mistrust in government and replacing it with private institutions has been the neoliberal agenda for over 40 years. The more all Americans distrust the government as a whole, the more the agenda is succeeding. Rejection of anything good or required being done by the state has become political dogma to basically the entire populace at this point. Decades of Carter “We have to accept our shitty fate!” and Raegan “The government is bad!” going effectively uncontested by both parties…
The Waffle House Index is just one comical fruit on that shitty project.