| BUSHWHACKED Life in George W. Bush's America Molly Ivins Lou Dubose New York: Random House, 2005 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-375-50752-6 | ||||
| ISBN 0-375-50752-3 | 347pp. | HC | $24.95 | |
| Page xii: | "Still, it's remarkable how easy it is for some casual, not necessarily malicious, but not-very-well-thought-through change in a policy, made by some clueless citizen in Washington, can simply wreck people's lives." |
| It looks like the sentence was rewritten, leading to the wrong word being left in place: the word S/B "to". |
| Page 38: | "If Bush ever gets the divided tax completely repealed (and these guys always get their whole loaf half at a time), B will get an additional $3,441,729 to spend annually." |
| Spelling typo: S/B "dividend". |
| Page 43: | "Kevin Phillips reports in his excellent book, Wealth and Democracy, the net worth, including home equity, of the middle quintile of Americans declined by 10 percent..." |
| Missing word and extra comma: S/B "As Kevin Phillips reports in his excellent book Wealth and Democracy, the" |
| Page 47: | "This administration has put in new elegibility requirements that make it more difficult for low-income families to obtain a range of government benefits, including housing programs, Medicaid, the school-lunch program, education, preschool programs (let's hear it for the Education President), foreign aid, veterans–hey, I hate when that happens." |
| Sorry, Molly; this sentence is simply screwy. Veterans are not a benefit to low-income families. (S/B "veterans' benefits", I think.) Foreign aid is, but only for foreign families. Could the words after the dash be a comment on the actual editing of the foregoing text? |
| Page 56: | "Sherry Durst* is not, like Scalia, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. She graduated high school in Tchula, a town of two thousand in the Mississippi Delta." |
| A common missing-word goof: S/B "She graduated from high school". |
| Page 76: | "After all, she has never published anything advocating phonics, and she has no real ties to the corporate world." |
| Molly Ivins doesn't like phonics? |
| Page 88: | "Bush's failure to fund the law at the levels he agreed to when negotiating with Kennedy make the latter more likely." |
| Number error: S/B "failure ... makes". |
| Page 93: | "If you want your child to be part of the group that is, see to it that she is middle class, preferably white (wealthy is even better), and that she attends a school where Title I is not her principle's principal preoccupation." |
| Misplaced parenthetical phrase: S/B "middle class (wealthy is even better), preferably white,". |
| Page 99: | "Along the way, state regulators learned that Agent Orange, the witches' brew of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T was mixed at CIC's Edison site." |
| Missing comma: S/B "Agent Orange, the witches' brew of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, was". |
| Page 104: | "You can also see the second story of Gail Horvath's house ..." |
| On the last line of page 97, it's a three-story house. (I thought that was unlikely when I first read it; now I'm sure it's wrong.) |
| Page 115: | "On the ground in front of the Leader's office Dumpster was the crumpled business card of Robert Knox." |
| Is "Dumpster" a proper name? Is it trademarked? |
| Page 121: | "... John Whitman owned $250,000 in Citi stock." |
| S/B "Citigroup". (Arguably) |
| Page 161: | "Watt laid out Mountain States' agenda in brief when he said 'We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.'" |
| James Watt never said this. I don't know its original source. |
| Page 165 (footnote): | "It seems McGraw was right on target. A year after he filed his report, The New York Times sent a reporter to Gillette, where he found methane bubbling out of the Belle Fourche." |
| This refers to the fourth item in a bulleted list higher on the page. However, the correlation between that item and the authors' statement is tenuous at best. |
| Page 167: | "The Senate (and the public) has to buy the argument that after a year Griles will forget ... that each of his former clients were drilling for methane in Wyoming while the Senate was voting on his nomination." |
| Number error: S/B "each of his former clients was", or better, "all of his former clients were". |
| Page 211: | "They wanted information about the thirteen $13 million in cash from the company for "phantom stock" and the $12 million White earned selling his stock after he was sworn in as secretary." |
| Extra word: S/B "$13 million". |
| Page 219: | "Two years later that decision was such an impediment to medical research that American Ph.D.'s have fled to England and Utah. Senator Orrin Hatch has challenged his own president's policy." |
| Extra period: S/B "England and Utah Senator". |
| Page 245: | "Associate justice Greg Abbott didn't use the A-word [activist] when he attacked an Owen's opinion that weakened the Texas Open Records Act..." |
| Extra word/unneeded possessive: S/B "Owen's opinion" or, better, "an Owen opinion". |
| Page 259: | "The Pentagon has stalled that one because they want to continue to induct seventeen-year-olds, only a miniscule proportion of military to begin with." |
| Missing & inappropriate words: S/B "a miniscule portion of our military". |
| Page 278: | "In 2002 General Ashcroft announced his desire to set up camps for U.S. citizens he deems "enemy combatants"." |
| Wrong title: S/B "attorney general Ashcroft". (Why does the thought of Ashcroft as a military general seem an oxymoron?) On the other hand, this may be sarcasm on the part of the authors; it appears again on page 281. |
| Page 286: | "Bush touted the $3.5 billion in 'new' funding for first responders, but Congressional Quarterly reports, 'According to the administration's own budget documents, The Bush plan for funding first responders amounts to double-entry bookkeeping: changes in the ledger that would result in no net increase in the amount of money flowing to cities, counties and states.' " |
| The problem I have with this is that it makes double-entry bookkeeping seem like a bad thing. It is just the opposite. |
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