Sen. Feinstein's sensitivity sweepstakes

jwr ^ | 9 27 05 | George Will

[flixxx]

Dianne Feinstein's thoughts on the nomination of John Roberts as chief justice of the United States should be read with a soulful violin solo playing, or perhaps accompanied by the theme song of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Those thoughts are about pinning one's heart on one's sleeve, sharing one's feelings and letting one's inner Oprah come out for a stroll.

[flixxx]

pretty much can clone this editorial for the upcoming Justice Nomination Battle...love the 'Oprah' reference!

[T.Smith]

"Remarkably, Feinstein was reading her statement. So her mare's-nest of inapposite words and unclear thoughts cannot be excused as symptoms of Biden's Disease, that form of logorrhea that causes victims, such as Sen. Joe Biden, to become lost on the syntactical back roads of their extemporaneous rhetoric."

I almost wept at the beauty of that paragraph.

[flixxx]

I know...he can skewer someone with the most elegant prose...'was reading her statement..'


love it.

[jscottdavis_for_48th_district]

Condi Rice could beat Diane Feinstein in the 2006 Senate race!

[Logophile]

Feinstein should have been more fluent because she was talking, as senators are wont to do, about . . . herself. Some of her "questions" to Roberts were a familiar form of preening, of moral exhibitionism. They were an example of how liberals compete, mostly among themselves, in the sensitivity sweepstakes. She might as well have simply said: Look here, Roberts, are you or are you not in my league as a world-class reacher-outer to, and a stayer-in-touch with, plain people?

Well put.

[flixxx]

Would hope she could, but it is California...I'm hoping Dr. Rice will run for a larger office...Prez or Vice Prez in the 2008 election.

[jscottdavis_for_48th_district]

I heard Condi tell Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet The Press" that she was not going to run for Prez. Although if she did, she'd also get my vote.

Arnold won California- we can erase Senator Fein-stain.

[dighton]

For my befuddlement I have only myself to blame. As a mere pinafored child I was taught to diagram English sentences on the blackboard. Consequently, though I can honor Mr. Faulkner as the champion of lost clauses and though I concede the influence of his Doctrine of Original Syntax, for me his sentence structure passes the bounds of parsability. These relative clauses with mysterious antecedents; these parenthetical intruders who drop by for a minute and stay for a week; these qualifications that wear away the original statement till nothing remains but an impalpable verbal dust; these mazy paragraphs in whose dark corridors I wander, a blind, terrified Theseus minus Ariadne’s thread; these non-commutable life sentences -- the second one in Requiem for a Nun runs just under two pages: what can a simple country boy like myself, suckled on Fowler’s Modern English Usage, do when set down in the middle of this grammatical Witches’ Sabbath?

-- Clifton Fadiman.