| CONTEMPT How the Right Is Wronging American Justice Catherine Crier New York: Rugged Land Books, 2005 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-59071-064-7 | ||||
| ISBN 1-59071-064-9 | 296pp. | HC/BWI | $27.95 | |
| Page 1: | "TapedattheTwoRiversBaptistChurchinNashville,Tennessee" |
| Ten words run together, apparently by the publisher's proportional-spacing software. |
| Page 4: | "As weapons, this rhetoric sounds quite damning, but the words are meaningless." |
| Number error: S/B "As a weapon". |
| Page 5: | "They are making efforts to curtail federal regulation of business, environmental protections, worker's rights, bankruptcy laws, tort liability, and property interests, among other causes." |
| Misplaced apostrophe: S/B "workers' rights". |
| Pages 8-10: | "Amendments I: Congress shall make no any law respecting an encouraging the establishment of the Christian religion, and shall make no law or prohibiting inconveniencing the free exercise thereof; or abridging promoting the freedom of Christian speech, or of the press; or the right of the people Christians peaceably or otherwise to assemble protest and to petition the government for redress of grievances." |
| The meaning of the highlighted portion comes out opposite to what's intended. It can be fixed by simply dropping the word "promoting" and leaving "abridging" alone. The amendment, in fact the entire "BILL OF THE RIGHT", could have been done more carefully, and to better effect. |
| Page 15: | "In such circumstances, Florida statute and case law ... allows the termination..." |
| Number error: S/B "allow". |
| Page 31: | "into law early that Monday morning." |
| Orphan line repeated from page 30. |
| Page 31: | "A judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals summed it up: 'When the fervor of political passions move the executive and the legislative branches..." |
| Number error: S/B "fervor of political passions moves". |
| Page 31: | "One hopes that George Greer, who after his experience with evangelicals must listen to his old roommate's 'People are Strange' with an entirely new perspective ." |
| The space after "perspective" suggests that some of the sentence was dropped. It's not a sentence as it stands; however, changing it to "One must hope that George Greer, after his experience with evangelicals, listens to his old roommate's 'People are Strange' with an entirely new perspective." makes it coherent. (Yes, back in college days, Judge Greer shared a frat house with Jim Morrison of The Doors — until the fraternity showed the unruly singer the door.) |
| Page 36: | "The argument had substantial legal weight behind it. In the case of South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court would later hold..." |
| Citing a case that hasn't been decided yet: Retroactive precedent? |
| Page 46: | "They will strike down Congressional legislation and ignore long-standing precedent, not for legitimate legal reasons, but because these acts and cases do not comport with her 'values'. " |
| Probably a typo: S/B "their". |
| Page 48: | "It was like 'fighting a crocodile in your bathtub when you go in to shave in the morning. You know it's there and you try not to think about it, but it's hard to think if anything else while you're shaving.' " |
| Almost certainly S/B "finding". Show me a judge that can fight an alligator while shaving, and I'll show you Judge Amos Moses. <g> |
| Page 60: | "It is rare for the justices to communicate on the telephone or in person, even at social functions." |
| Really? Do they use hand signals? No, I've got it: They've mastered Consensual 9, and it only SEEMS like they're not communicating. <g> |
| Page 113: | "Bush won by a little less than 3.5 million popular votes, 4 million votes more than his popular vote difference in 2000 (when he received 500,000 less than Gore)." |
| This does not compute as written. But strike the word "difference", and it does. |
| Page 114: | "The Christian Coalition, founded in 1988 by Pat Robertson, simply went to the presses with 'voter guides'. The coalition disguises these guides as bipartisan." |
| Inconsistent capitalization: S/B "Coalition". |
| Pages 116-7: | "If judges don't act in their interests, they're God-in the reactionary Right's quest to make America in its image." |
| Sentence fragment on pages 116 & 117 do not connect; something is missing. |
| Page 150: | "Other omissions they couldn't forsee." |
| Spelling: S/B "foresee". |
| Page 153: | "While James Madison did concede to Thanksgiving in 1815, he regretted it in his diaries twenty years later." |
| In its sense of meaning as "yield", this word is OK. Still, I think a better choice would be "consent" or "accede". |
| Page 154: | "If postmen were to be given a day of rest, Johnson argued, Congress would have to choose between Saturday and Sunday. The choice would force them to declare which day was indeed the Sabbath. Johnson predicted that if the government started to decide what were 'the laws of God,' religious oppression could run rampant. Even those who opposed Johnson argued that choosing Sunday as a day off would not 'form the justly odious combination of church and state.' " |
| It seems to me that "not" is not wanted here. |
| Page 157: | "When Tom DeLay boasts that Congress can 'unset the courts' because they have the 'power of the purse,' he threatens..." |
| S/B "unseat the courts". |
| Page 161: | "Dred Scott v. Sandford" |
| The discussion of this famous case uses three forms of the name: Sandford, Sanford, and Stanford. I know it's not "Stanford", the last variant seen, because the page says that's a clerk's mistake. Elsewhere, the text refers to John Sanford. So, then, "Sandford" must also be wrong. |
| Page 168: | "Nothing in the text of the Constitution requires judges to interpret the Constitution using the original intent of the Framers. James Madison was so opposed to this possibility; he refused to release his notes of the Constitutional Convention until decades after." |
| The semicolon after "possibility" is wrong. It's hard to know how to set things right: either change it to a comma, or change "so" to "also". |
| Page 173: | "The radical Right insists that it speaks for a disenfranchised majority of U.S. citizens, what former president Richard Nixon coined the 'silent majority.' " |
| S/B "called". |
| Pages 174-5: | "Presidents as ideologically contrary as FDR and Richard Nixon regularly commissioned their own opinion polls and obsessively pored over the results. This goes on in the Bush administration as well, although President Bush has dismissed the importance of polls by saying, 'If I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I'd be pretty ineffective.' He certainly would - if success was based on promoting what the majority of Americans really believe. The president and his ultraconservative supporters don't like scientifically based polling that disputes their claims. So they ignore it and pray that the rest of us will too." |
| This does not seem to make sense. If success were as the highlighted phrase defines it, and Bush promoted such beliefs, why would he be ineffective? How could he not be successful, both politically and practically? |
| Page 178: | "Make no mistake, the issue is important to us, but to my mind these numbers say, 'We'll look into our own hearts decide for ourselves.' " |
| Missing word "and": S/B "look into our own hearts and decide". |
| Page 182: | "The 'establishment of religion' clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution says simply this: 'Congress shall make no law respecting establishment of religion.' " |
| Missing word "an": S/B "respecting an establishment of religion". This same error occurrs in one other place. |
| Page 184: | "The Barna Group also says that American Christians who describe themselves as 'Evangelical' is holding steady..." |
| Number error due to missing words: S/B "that the number of Americans". |
| Page 185: | "A Harris poll in June 2005 indicates that 55 percent of Americans was creationism or intelligent design taught along with evolution." |
| Wrong word: S/B "want". |
| Page 195: | "He wore a tie with a drawing of the Incredible Hulk, the gigantic, green comic-book hero." |
| Missing comma: S/B "green, comic-book hero". Otherwise it can mean the gigantic hero of a green comic-book. |
| Page 202: | "In the 2004 elections, Republicans won a clear majority in the Senate. They now hold fifty-five of that body's seats—and were dominated by ultraconservatives." |
| Improper change of tense. Fix it by going for the center: S/B "held". |
| Page 210: | "...many local school boards are acutally editing their libraries..." |
| Spelling: S/B "actually". |
| Page 222: | "Many of these laws were passed with the help of right-wing fear mongering." |
| Hyphen needed: S/B "fear-mongering". |
| Page 227: | "The following list shows the percentage of these cases in which a justice voted to strike down a federal law as constitutional." (emphasis in original) |
| S/B "unconstitutional". |
| Page 234: | "This time, the house of faith won." |
| Proper name: S/B "Household of Faith". |
| Page 236: | "They teach about the Klu Klux Klan..." |
| S/B "Ku Klux Klan". (Unless it's a {sic} -- it's in a quote.) |
| Page 246: | Discrepancy in figures: "$185,849" in line 1 vs. "$135,849" in line 6 |
| Obviously it's a typo. But which is right? |
| Page 277: | "Gray is a board member of the Federalist Society and Progress for America and co-chair of Freedom Works..." |
| The highlighted words are printed in italics at a uniquely large point size. |
| Page 289: | "Barton's numerous books and videotapes ... are wildly popular in the evangelical Christian community, though not respected by historians.." |
| Two full stops after "historians". |
| Page 296: | "I have mixed emotions about my ultimate task master, Web Stone (just kidding) who was relentless in his drive to see this book out in time to respond to the Supreme Court debate now underway." |
| S/B "under way". Also, I'd put a comma after "(just kidding)". |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.