The Ubiquitous Grammar Cop

This posting to a Fark.com forum made me laugh and gives me an opportunity to parse it. "I sincerely doubt Liberals hate working people. More likely they think of them like the chickens who lay their morning eggs and the pigs who gave them their bacon."

I have to paraphrase Al Franken, presently running for U.S. Senate in Minnesota from his book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them . He said in so many words that liberals love America the way adults love their loved ones. They see both good and bad traits and want their loved ones to enhance their good traits while overcoming their bad ones. Conservatives love America the way a four-year old loves her Mommy. She thinks that everything Mommy does is good and anyone who speaks against Mommy is bad.

A friend of mine suggested I parse the grammatical missteps in the final debate between Senators Obama and McCain. Honestly, it would be sort of unfair to compare the oratory style of McCain against Obama. Since I live in Chicago I have witnessed the plodding oratory skills of Mayor Richard Daley during his unscripted press conferences (and he was a prosecutor in the Illinois State's Attorney's office). Also, I've had healthy servings of schadenfreude over the last few weeks. In my opinion, political debates in today's television and YouTube era does not possess the rhetorical gravitas of past debates (Kennedy/Nixon in 1960 comes to mind). Instead they have several key elements that people see and react to: sound bites and visuals. Some of the sound bites offered by McCain and Obama I deem worthy of these internet forum inspired tags: LOL , WIN , FAIL , or FACEPALM . Here are some examples taken directly from the debate transcript provided by the Los Angeles Times. MCCA...

Why do people persistently confuse socialism and communism? They are not the same thing even though they have similar elements. Potatoes and carrots are both vegetables that grow underground; no one confuses them.

Electioneering should not resemble the Two Minute Hate as represented in George Orwell's 1984 .

How can people take you seriously when your direct quotes supply satirists (to great comedic effect, no less)?

For the last two weeks, everyone in the mainstream corporate media has been bleating about the dire straits our economy is presently in as if it's a big surprise that it's come down to this. For some people who actually follow such things, this present crisis is simply the culmination of several things that has happened over the last thirty to forty years of plutocratic policies wearing a fiscally conservative mask. Our government, egged on by lobbyists who abuse the power afforded them by the First Amendment, allowed the deregulation of the rules that oversee the activities of corporations (trading, speculation, et cetera). They removed our currency from the gold standard, weakening the dollar against other currencies. One of the first things they did, possibly under the notion that it was no longer needed, was remove the 0.25% tax on all stocks and commodities bought and sold in our markets in the 1960s. For example, if I purchased $10,000 in Apple Computer stock, I would pa...