“Robert Mueller has a long and sordid history of illicitly targeting innocent people that is a stain upon the legacy of American jurisprudence.”
I generally try to avoid comments on grammar, but since FReepers have made it a cause celebre herein, I opine:
The sentence is perfectly well written. As it is written, neither the addition of commas nor the word substitution (i.e., which for that) would improve it; rather, either would disimprove it.
Rewriting it with both the commas and the word substitution would make it less elegant, even if grammatically correct.
I am not a lifelong editor, but I am also old school; I scored well within the top half of the top one percentile in Standard English aptitude tests.
This sentence is written the way well-educated writers were taught to write. Grammar is no longer highly valued or well taught.
Thank you for chiming in.
I think the grammatical issue is important because parsing capacity is key to understanding. Any apparent deficit at that stage casts doubt upon one’s subsequent responses; it raises questions as to one’s grasp of what is being discussed, which is elemental to making a cogent contribution.
Among the things Conservatives can ill afford is to have lurkers in these forums observing that our discussions here are uninformed, or careless as to facts. We’re already under the unfair pressure of wildly imbalanced scrutiny; we’ve got to be accurate and intelligent in what we say and how. Freepers have contributed competently to important dialogue of crucial import to the entire nation. That’s a tradition we all ought to strive to uphold.