"NYTimes Edit Board ruthlessly attacks some guy named 'Mr. Scott' who they claim is the governor of Wisconsin."

"No, but he’s a damn fine starship engineer, I don’t care what the Timesmen say."

Hilarious screwup. And it's all the more hilarious because the subject of the editorial is doubt about Governor Scott Walker's use of the expression "drafting error" to explain a proposed change in the statutory law about the mission of the University of Wisconsin System.

NYTimes Edit Board ruthlessly attacks some guy named "Mr. Scott" who they claim is the governor of Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/y8iNv5ROO8
— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) February 6, 2015

So was that really, truly a drafting error by The New York Times, or was this behind-the-scene mockery that accidentally got published, "Mush from the Wimp"-style?

Here in Wisconsin, Walker-haters have often called the man "Scottie." Here's an example in some video Meade shot during the protests of 2011: "Koch Brothers" (in top hats) manipulating their puppet Walker and saying "Come along, Scottie!"



The New York Times has "brazenly deleted" its use of the moniker "Mr. Scott," and if confronted, I supposed it would say it was a "drafting error." If so, we could get all derisive and contemptuous and call the "excuse" "ridiculous" and the original draft "pernicious" in precise emulation of the NYT editorial.

Here's my post from a couple days ago on the underlying substance of this controversy: "Why did Scott Walker attack the University of Wisconsin's century-old 'Wisconsin Idea' slogan/mission?" I don't know whether Scott Walker and his people intended to delete some statutory verbiage because they recognized it to be "The Wisconsin Idea" and they oppose that idea or because it just looked like meaningless blabber. Here's a photograph showing the editing that seems to mean so much to Walker's antagonists.


(Click to enlarge.)

To my eye, it looks like the changes were, first, to augment the mission to include meeting the state's "workforce needs" and then to eliminate what the editor thought was excess verbiage. Note that The Wisconsin Idea is still there in the first sentence in the words "to... discover and disseminate knowlege... beyond the boundaries of its campuses."

The Times editorial ends with some perseveration about "red meat for conservative zealots," but come on. If that editing counts as red meat for conservative zealots, this outrage over word editing is a big bloody slab of red meat for liberal zealots.

AND: I'm frontpaging something I said in the comments:

As with the Wisconsin protests, we're seeing an effort to make people think they must be enraged at this monster Walker.

I backfired in 2011 and in 2012 and in 2014. Maybe it seems new to some people outside of Wisconsin, but it's so stupid and boring to me.

And this is especially stupid, because look at the words that people are throwing a fit about. Do they really think the American people are going to understand this tempest in a teapot? First, you have to internalize the devotion to something called The Wisconsin Idea (which I suspect will read as banal and obvious to people in other states: Why is that something special about Wisconsin as opposed to what all universities try to do?). Second, you have to believe that the change in the language was anything other than weeding out some verbose obviousness. Third, you have to think that the University's mission statement needs to appear in the statute... and not just appear, but appear repetitiously.

Who would go there? It makes absolutely no sense.

MORE: The editorial reads as though some local Wisconsin hothead spewed it out for them. Maybe the original referred to Walker by his first name and the minimal editing inserted the "Mr.," because that's a longstanding NYT convention and some mindless functionary was tending to the superficial task. That is, no fact-checking was going on and Scott looks like a last name. There actually is a Governor Scott in the U.S. right now (in Florida).