| UTTER INCOMPETENTS Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush Thomas Oliphant New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-312-36017-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-312-36017-7 | 291p. | HC | $24.95 | |
| Page 35: | "This protean struggle unfolded despite strong evidence that even under the most wild-eyed projections, the wildlife refuge's potential output, if developed over a decade, would at the most be the equivalent of a motorist topping off his gas tank—in short a major political campaign disproportionate to the energy supply gains allegedly at stake." |
| That ultimate clause lacks a verb: S/B "in short, it was a major political campaign" or equivalent. |
| Page 66: | "The infamous fire sales of huge tracks of open space..." |
| Typo: S/B "tracts". |
| Page 66: | "President Bush, however, knew no limits as he placed Gale Norton, a conservative fox from the West with a long record of industry support and political activism, in charge of the chicken coop." |
| Not to be sexist, but that's "fox" as in vulpine, not "fox" as in va-va-voom. |
| Page 69: | "And still later, as the end of Bush's presidency loomed closer that its heyday, the fellow who coined the term that had more usage than any other propaganda phrase in the long journey from Austin to Washington, tried to remain loyal but felt obliged to summarize Bush's record where it counted as 'moderately weak'." |
| Misplaced comma: S/B "Washington tried to remain loyal, but". |
| Page 73: | "After a year of the hard work to which he was usually and notoriously inattentive, Bush and Congress had managed to enact the first huge change in the system of federal aid to schools..." |
| Does this mean Bush was inattentive to the work of enacting NCLB, or (as I'd guess) to the other work of governing in general? |
| Pages 74-75: | "The first suit came from Connecticut, which like the others argued through Attorney General Richard Blumenthal that the Department of Education in Washington was either capricious in its rules or was establishing mandates without providing the resources to meet them." |
| Poorly worded. I'm sure the other states did not make use of Connecticut's AG. A slightly better construction is "which, like the others, argued through its Attorney General Richard Blumenthal". |
| Page 80: | "Bushhad his program and it was indeed conservative, or at least business-oriented; just not very compassionate." |
| Punctuation: S/B business-oriented, just not very compassionate". (Alternatively, add a verb to the last clause.) |
| Page 89: | "In the famous words of a popular radio commentator from the 1940s, Fulton Lewis Jr., 'Interesting, if true.' But it wasn't." |
| Ambiguous reference to previous sentence: S/B "But it wasn't true." |
| Page 93: | "Just twenty-five years later, not only were both parents working, but the home they might have managed to buy was eating up a much larger portion of their income, they weren't saving anymore, and yet they had also taken on unprecedented levels of debt." |
| I assume the highlighted phrase means they were unable to put anything aside in a savings account. (It could arguably mean they were saving at the same rate as the previous family did.) |
| Page 97: | "All by itself, in other words, higher costs for the same housing wiped out that $275 wage gain." |
| Number error: S/B "All by themselves,". |
| Page 102: | "...the British pound one day rose to a value of $2. That hadn't occurred since Bush's father was president under very different circumstances." |
| Do these "very different circumstances" apply to Bush's father's presidency, or to the rise of the British pound? |
| Page 132: | "No minor league politician he, Reagan never made that mistake again." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "minor-league". |
| Pages 136-7: | "The percentage of Americans owning their own residence continued inching toward 70 percent by the time Bush was reelected." |
| So... 70% owned homes when he was reelected? |
| Page 146: | "And so was the further compounding of the tragedy as a result of the decision by the president's brother Florida governor Jeb Bush (an extremely religious conservative) to use every tool in the state's legal arsenal to maintain her on a feeding tube." |
| In other news, the satirical news outlet The Onion calls for Clinton to deploy commas to Oliphant. |
| Page 150: | President Bush: "In questions where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be..." |
| Presumed, presumably. (I question that.) |
| Page 152: | "One of them involved linking the long-standing conservative campaign to find 'strict constructionists' to nominate to the federal bench to the movement's goals, without overtly seeking people with long paper trails of opposition to abortion rights." |
| This is an example of Oliphant's hard-to-parse sentences. Changing some of five the "tos" to some other preposition would improve it. |
| Page 173: | "This pattern didn't just affect homeland security, anti-terrorism efforts, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it affected nearly every aspect of the Bush presidency." |
| (#5) And that's why Oliphant's writing this book, in case you've forgottten. |
| Page 184: | "What the intelligence agencies generated was a series of 'dots,' another eventually famous word, that were communicated to very high levels of the administration." |
| This term is not defined until the end of the page, and then only implicitly. |
| Page 185: | "Moussaoui's detainers did not alert the FBI's top officials in Washington, but the case was known within the CIA (a memo described him as possibly a 'suicide hijacker'), including Director Tenet." |
| S/B "was known by people within the CIA". (And, by common usage and precedent in this book, Tenet's title should not be capitalized.) |
| Page 204: | "At first, hardly anyone noticed; at most a few peeps of protest, albeit prophetic, from the left and the libertarian right as a new era of intense domestic security operations commenced." |
| Missing verb: I suggest "came" or "issued". S/B "a few peeps of protest, albeit prophetic, issued from the left". |
| Page 206: | "Virtually al the proceedings were initially held in secret, with sealed records, and thus secret evidence, often no lawyers were involved, and family members remained in terrified ignorance of what was happening to loved ones." |
| Make this into two sentences: S/B "evidence. Often,". |
| Page 212: | "The invasion is unthinkable without the context of the 9/11 attacks, and the only evidence that has ever surfaced about the administration prior to them is that Iraq and the danger posed by al Qaeda were well down its list of foreign policy priorities until that horrid September morning." |
| This contradicts the testimony of Paul Elliott. Also, S/B "foreign-policy". |
| Page 213: | "Operating in secrecy, the facts about what had transpired did not emerge immediately from the Bush administration." |
| Dangling participle. |
| Page 216: | "Invading Iraq as a means of 'shocking' Islamic extremists and regimes that either harbored or tolerated terrorists proceeded at the very least because Saddam Hussein's regime was so weak and that an invasion could be mounted comparatively quickly and at tolerably minimum costs, at least in theory." |
| Extra word: S/B just "and" or, better yet, "that". |
| Page 218: | "...that Iraq had gone shopping for a uranium source called yellow cake in the African nation of Niger..." |
| Extra space: S/B "yellowcake". |
| Page 224: | "When General Anthony Zinni retired well before the invasion as the boss at CENTCOM, the United States-based command that oversaw operations in the region—he left behind a contingency war plan..." |
| Mismatched punctuation: S/B "CENTCOM—the". (There is another similar.) |
| Page 227: | "Placed in its 'Periscope' section and not picked up by any other publication during the final month of pre-invasion hysteria, Newsweek magazine reported the defector had told U.N. weapons inspectors..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Newsweek magazine's article on the defector said he". |
| Page 228: | "Aware that few members [of Congress] would read the secret document beyond its ominous summary, the document included numerous references to the widespread dissents about whether the claims were supported by solid evidence." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "the administration". (Although this doesn't really fix the sentence; that would take a total rewrite.) |
| Page 230: | "The list is horrifyingly long, even when restricted to large-scale, unintended consequences: roughly four thousand dead Americans; more than forty thousand injuries and wounds; unknown tens of thousands of dead Iraqis; more than $500 billion spent already; the biggest refugee crisis in the region in sixty years, and in the world since World War II; a shattering of America's standing..." |
| How do injuries differ from wounds, and hasn't it been more than 60 years since the end of WW2? |
| Page 235: | "The switch came in early May of 2003 from a retired Army general, who had for months been the symbol of Rumsfeld's bureaucratic coup taking over control of the postwar reconstruction of the country from people who actually knew something about the complex process, to a veteran diplomat who had gone into the private sector." |
| Maybe I missed this nuance, but my impression is that General Garner knew what he was doing, but was kept from consulting the experts on Iraq. See e.g. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. |
| Page 250: | "...the money used to procure arms and pay fighters (double what the Afghan armed forces pays)." |
| So how much does the Afghan armed forces pays? Are it a paltry sum? |
| Page 272: | "By 63 to 36 percent, the American public declared him unwilling to listen to different points of view. That's because he wasn't." |
| Somewhere, a negator is going astray. S/B "that's because he was" (unwilling). |
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