Posted on 04/09/2011 2:31:20 AM PDT by quesney
Re “Donald Trump Gets Weirder,” by Gail Collins (column, April 2):
Even before Gail Collins was with the New York Times, she has written nasty and derogatory articles about me. Actually, I have great respect for Ms. Collins in that she has survived so long with so little talent. Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers) is not at a high level. More importantly, her facts are wrong!
...I don't need Ms. Collins's advice. There is a large segment of our society who believe Barack Obama, indeed, was not born in the United States. His grandmother from Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth. His family in Honolulu is fighting over which hospital in Hawaii he was born in-they just don't know.
He has not been able to produce a “birth certificate” -merely a totally unsigned “certificate of live birth”-which is of very little significance. Unlike a birth certificate, a certificate of live birth is very easy to obtain. Equally of importance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hussein Obama was born there-no bills, no doctors names, no nurses names, no registrations, no payments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in newspapers, some feel the grandparents put an ad in order to show that he was a citizen of the U.S. with all of the benefits. Everybody, after all, and especially then, wanted to be a citizen.
[...]
For some reason, the press protects President Obama beyond anything or anyone I have ever seen.
[...]
Open your eyes, Gail, there's at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherished Constitution!
DONALD J. TRUMP New York, April 7, 2011
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
He is a creep and a joke.”
All true, but Obama is creepier and a bigger joke. And until you are running for The Office of the President of the United States, we have very little choice between the creeps and the jokers. : )
>I stated before that his investigators should take the newspaper listings of birth announcements and investigate the validity of everyone on that list. If the listings were fakes, then there should be many false names on the list. FWIW<
The two newspaper listings were absolute and complete copies of one another. Very very suspicious if not imposable. They had to be planted there in the archives in Hawaii.
Unfortunately, it had to be kept simple for most present day Americans to understand it.
As the operator of “the Apprentice”, Donald Trump understands this.
:D
I don’t care where he was born. Not one bit.
And you know what? He never will release the long form. Cause he doesn’t have to. He loves people like you discussing that while he goes out and destroys our country.
He is going to be president until he is defeated. Now we can moan and groan and wonder about where he came from but in the end it doesn’t matter one bit.
Now you are free to focus on his birth.
I am free to, and choose to focus on what the man is doing now, not where he came from which by the way, he had no control over that.
I honestly believe that he probably applied for foreign aid as a student. His college records are what woudl be important to see.
I see your point, but I think that without pushing for it and making noise we will never know.
To the person who stated the verb tense was wrong in the first sentence: On the contrary, Trump’s context is that she has written nasty articles about him, and that action (writing articles) is an ongoing action. The introductory dependent clause does not change that. If he had used the ‘had written’ verb form, it would have been an incorrect implication that the action was something that no longer occurred.
I am the one who raised this point, and it is something of a pedantic nicety, but since you are one of those charged with grading ACTs I am going to challenge you on this one. The introductory dependent clause is relevant, because the correct verb tense of the main clause is determined by the time/action relationship to the action in the dependent clause, i.e. the action is before. Since it is before some past tense action, the thing in the main clause must be pluperfect. Now to cover your point about continuity of action it should correctly have read "she had been writing nasty..." But unless you take years of classical Latin you probably do not learn the niceties of verb tenses, moods and voices because they are not generally taught as part of English grammar.
Trump’s opening paragraph is weakly developed, lacking a clear topic sentence, but clearly the intent is to slam Collins, which he effectively does in his second sentence.
Wrong. The clear topic sentence is the assertion that Gail Collins had been writing nasty and derogatory articles about Trump. After disarming the reader by damning her with faint praise in the second sentence (litotes), he then calls her a journalistic hack of no literary merit in the third.
His third sentence is poorly constructed, particularly the parenthetical which is really adding nothing to the sentence (except tooting his own horn). His closing sentence in paragraph one is his thesis, which is clear and concise.
No that is not his thesis. His thesis is that she his a journalistic hack who has written nasty things about him. And, she cannot even get her facts right.
In paragraph two, his opening sentence could be more succinct, particularly in the introductory clause.
Again, you completely miss the point. Having called her a journalistic hack in the first paragraph, he then goes on to state, here, that the purpose of this letter is to respond to something she has written elsewhere regarding the "birther" issue. And he refers to that "off stage" action in a manner that we know it happened and have the essential elements of it without having to go and look up said nasty article. It is quite nicely done, actually.
He gets a bit overzealous with comma usage in the next two sentences, but all are appropriately placed.
Go read "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" and get back to us on this one.
Using the word ‘who’ rather than the word ‘that’ when referring to the ‘large segment’ is a bit perplexing, since who is used for persons and that is used for objects. What to do when an object is used to describe a group of persons? (I think even the wisest grammarian would struggle with that one. I’m sure there’s a rule, but I don’t have time to go look it up.)
Nope, a pedant would struggle with the ambiguity of the rule, but a wise person would suggest that it could go either way and leave it as a matter of individual preference. Precisely grammatical would be "a large segment which believes," but Trump in fact is simply reflecting his personal cognitive psychology, his cognition that the the collective "segment" is indeed not a loony left-wing nutcase communist type of collective, but rather a group of individual human beings who have in common a certain view that Collins disdains. His choice "who believe" reflects that psychological perspective, denoting them has humans who have individual beliefs, and have one particular one which they share.
...Moving on, I do not believe the quotations are required in the first sentence of the third paragraph. Capitalizing the names of the documents might have been more effective. Adding the adjective ‘official’ before Birth Certificate would have added more clarity.
One adds quotes around a noun phrase to emphasize that you are giving it a special technical meaning in this writing, distinguishing it, technically, from the other noun phrase that was placed in quotations.
His punctuation in the opening sentence is flawed in several places.
He does not use any except for a hyphen to set off the ellipses, which is not formally correct, but a standard in colloquial writing. Everyone knows what he is talking about.
..,He then uses the ‘as far as’ again, which stylistically could be considered overused...
Yeah. Ok. Touche. You got him, got him real good for once.
Except that you did not. The quips about "birthers" in that Collins article, to which he is apparently responding, is another off-stage fisticuffs about which we are now clued in so that here, center stage, we know to which joint he is applying the slash of his saber.
... but this is the least of his worries in this sentence, which is poorly constructed.
So here we get to the heart of the matter, the entire thesis that we are trying to debate here, but you merely note it and pass it by. You state that the sentence is poorly constructed. How so? The intent is quite clear. There is no fault in construction, no inability to follow the flow of Trump's logic.
Could one do better. Well,let's try "Among the many explanations for the newspaper advertisements announcing 0's birth, one is that his grandparents wanted to ensure he would receive all the benefits of US citizenship." Something like this is more formal, using just one main and one dependent clause. So is it an improvement?
Well, when Trump states "as for the two notices" he is again pointing to the off-stage action and telling us about something else that appeared in that Collins article, to which he is apparently responding. Our "improved and less clumsy" sentence does not point to and sufficiently describe that off-stage activity, so that we know into which eye-socket the rapier is being thrust.
The use of ‘thereto’ indicates his familiarity with legal documents. It is not a commonly used word, but is used often in the legal profession, particularly in real estate contracts. (I used to work in a commercial real estate office, and typed many contracts with sentences ending in ‘thereto’ all the time.)
Oh, my God! Or, oh my God! I am not a lawyer. I never worked in a law office. I am fully familiar with the word "thereto" and have frequently used it.
The last sentence in this paragraph is poorly punctuated, but the meaning is clear.
I don't think so.....
Let us try to build this sentence. Start with "Everybody wanted to be a United State citizen." Then we add a parenthetical "Everybody, after all, wanted to be a United State citizen." Its effect is a rhetorical "come on you political hack, everyone knows this! He then adds to it another parenthetical, "especially then" for further rhetorical emphasis, limiting his somewhat hyperbolic claim that everybody wanted to be a US citizen to a specific point in time, back then before we bankrupted the US and undermined its Constitution.
His next two paragraphs lack focus and unity. Combining those two paragraphs into one would have been more effective, using his topic sentence in the fifth paragraph (about the press) and moving the sentence about the derogatory (a term he used twice in one sentence, which is a poor style choice) nature of the word ‘birther’ to be the topic sentence for perhaps the second or third paragraphs. He uses a fairly sophisticated word (aspirant) in this paragraph, indicating specific word choice.
The unity of the 4th paragraph is just fine. Journalist hack Collins is singular in her attacks on birthers because they question her candidate, and no one else with this same problem would have been allowed to stand for election.
The 5th paragraph make a separate point about the more generalized delusion of the press, they are so in bed with 0 that they have sacrifice their Pulitzers to the cause.
I do not believe the quotation marks around “scam” are required.
Oh, Ok.
The closing sentence is a comma splice and should be two sentences or should have a semicolon after Gail instead of the comma.
Yep. You got Trump dead to rights here. His head-shot at Gail for closing her eyes to the constitutional peril, barely singes a loose hair because a comma should have been a semicolon or a period. Maybe Gail should write this in response to Trump. It would be a very convincing repartee. I don't need to open my eyes. Trump wrote a colloquial sentence, O Come on Gail, and so we can ignore his argument. I hope she tries it. I am sure it will swing a lot of public sympathy her way. I mean after all. Why should the journalistic hack have to stoop to defend our Constitution before the charges of someone who did not put the period after Gail.
In terms of content and message, overall I believe he was effective in staying on point, although structurally there were areas that could use some fine tuning.
He stayed exactly and unwaveringly on point, the point that his answering some hack journalist's derogatory article more concerned to criticize his efforts to get to the bottom of whether the uncertainty surrounding Obama's birth constitutes a constitutional crisis than she is about the peril that the crisis poses to the nation.
He did support many of his statements with strong assertions, but to be more effective in his content, some reference to his sources should have also been included.
Oh man, I hope he takes your advice. I really wanted the ten page essay replete with footnotes, references and additional explanatory detail. His meaning is far too transparent and I can hardly spend an evening on his letter trying to tease out his deeper essential meaning.
So, there you have it. After reviewing it carefully, I wouldn’t call it ‘horrible’(believe me, I have seen ‘horrible!’), but it was also not as effective as it could have been. It indicates to me that he spent very little time on it and probably just wrote it like many of us do when composing an ‘angry email’ response.
The fact that it is exactly on point, logically well structured and with at best a few extraneous words shows that he thought hard about it. This was not just dashed off.
So, having worked through all of that, where are we. First, I had hoped to learn something from our grammarians and composition experts, but did not, except that our poor kids are in the hands of folks who have no appreciation for the subtlety of language and believe that they have grammatical quibbles where they don't.
More especially, I am more concerned that a misguided school marmish approach to writing (not this analysis in particular but rather the tenor of the general line of criticism on this thread) taught us far more about the state of American education, and what it obsesses about, treating American educators as the collectivists they have turned themselve into, than it did about Donald Trump.
My longwinded analysis of his analysis aside, your assessment is the better and more relevant. The point of language is to structure arguments and to communicate them. The impact on the reader is what is foremost.
I would sugggest that you ponder the fact that that poster grades ACTs and determines who will get into our top schools. I will then allow you to draw your own conclusions about how we got where we are and whether there is any hope of climbing back out of the hole we are in.
Someone as direct at straightforward as Theodore Roosevelt could never get into Harvard these days and would not therefore be presidential material. "Bully" just does not cut it in any well-structured sentence following the sentence structure cookie cutter templates that are used to educate and then test our better students at our better public schools these days.
Hemmingway would have failed high school. He still fails high schools he does not even attend. One of the great ironies is that his archive of material is at Harvard, which is about as far in style and personality from Hemmigway as one can get these days.
You have too much time on your hands, my friend. Have a great day!
Actually, I am having a great day. As someone very concerned about what our best universities are producing I have solved several problems all at one time.
First, I have been trying, for some time, to understand the divergence between college admission scores, notionally correct answers on preparatory tests which I know to be incorrect, and the intellectual quality of the students so marked. I understand now what I had only been able to hypothesize before.
Second, I have been trying to understand the divergence between what I would describe as "character" and the output of our better universities. Now I do. It is related to my first problem.
Third, I have always been a bit in awe of the writing style-mavens that appear around here, those who seem to be able to recognize problems in writing which I view as perfectly well composed, if perhaps short of flawless. This I now also understand far better. The nitpickers are applying the rote sentence construction templates that they have memorized, and slaved over, for years, and forced their thoughts and writings into for years, and it is that to which is referred when one uses the term sentence structure. There is a similar one for paragraph structure.
But this all forgest a few other things, like first, having something worth saying, which requires developing a sense of what is important and how to think through a problem. Second, but not separate, it requires a logical framework to structure arguments. And this is where the whole thing falls apart. Narrative frameworks do not start first with a paragraph structure (topical sentence and supporting sentences) and sentence structures, but a picture or sequence of pictures to be presented, i.e. what the filmakers refer to as montage, composed of a sequence of scenes containing an idea, the viewpoint of the author and the viewpoint of the reader.
So, structure properly is dictated by that which is to be presented and how best to represent the idea(s) to the viewpoint of the viewer, the reader, etc. It can start with the conclusion first, or it can describe the weather first, or it can describe the farcial jurnalistic harridan first, all dependent upon the needs the author perceives to paint the picture.
And all of that, and the fact that individual character matters, is lost in what is going on in modern education.
And forth, since a thesis was presented here in this forum which I just had a hard time buying in to, I wanted to see whether I could sustain an argument against that thesis or be pursuaded by the strength of the arguments in support. I figured I might learn in the process. I learned a lot, but not what my interlocutors hoped to teach me.
So, yes I have had a wonderful afternoon understanding Trump's letter from the various vantage points of its readers. A great afternoon.
I hope that yours has been as gratifying and as productive.
Fourth, not forth.
And, you misunderstood my post completely. I am on your side. I did not analyze to criticize, but to support Mr. Trump’s letter as not as ‘horrible’ as it was being suggested by some. Most of us agreed it was good, but I wanted to give some substantiation to my assessment and not just come off as someone who purported to know-it-all, but given my credentials, had some qualifications for making my comments.
You, on the other hand, have just come across as a know-it-all. Perhaps you do. I defer to your wisdom on all matters heretofore and thereto.
I apologize if my efforts to discuss a broad range of philosophical issues comes across as “know it all.” I know nothing and am trying to find light in the darkness.
Real men don't run spell check. William F. Buckley was infamous for his typographical errors in emails. It would be a sacrilege for a mortal being to presume to exceed the achievements of such an exaltes spirit. Only God is perfect.
Firstly, I never said it was a “horribly-written” letter. I quoted someone else who had and added that it was written at a 10th grade level, maybe.
Using the Flesch–Kincaid formula for assessing grade level, Trump's letter rated a 9.8, or roughly, right where I had assessed it.
Yu got that ther rite ravinwolf. Ain’t nobody a wantin’ tuh here nun o’ them ther overedumacated folk a tawkin’ ther nunsince an usin’ them beg words what nobody don’t never heered uv. Eben us bak in da holler kin figger out what ol’ Donnie is a sayin’. He don’t need no Billy Airs fer no ghosty rider.
The most productive “intellectuals” only bother to write when they have a point and they strive to make their point as clearly as the point can be made because they have a point and want everyone to understand it. The problem is that 95% of the overeducated have no point, but if everyone understood that, society would depreciate or rather properly appraise their value, and that is the safe harbor that liberalism grants them.
But if he is as rich as what i hear, he is evidently no dummy
and it appears he is putting a lot on the line, his fortune and his reputation in saying what he believes,
I will be honest, i have no money, but if i had a fortune i would have to ask my self if i would have the guts to be as frank in my opinions as i am.
If he exposes Hussein it would be unbelievable. What is the left so afraid of. Wake up and do your homework liberals and maybe you could understand what TRUMP is talking about.
God told the people not to call themselves liberals but to be liberal in giving to some one else of of their own, not steal from some one else.
So its people like Trump at this time who is giving of himself, not stealing from someone else.
I don,t remember when some one who calls themselves liberal gave to any one, at least with out stealing it from some one else, the only ones i ever see give of their own are the conservatives.
I don’t understand how anyone cannot love Sarah!
Actually my vote will be for the people who believe in a few things that matter to me the most.
Individual liberty, free trade within the united states, people States not police States, anti unions, anti extortionists within Government.
In other words i will not vote for any one who do not believe in the bill of rights with out doctoring it up to suit what is popular, or to suit themselves.
i will not vote for any one who thinks the government has to dictate how much the price of something should be and who can sell what,
I will not vote for any one who thinks that the government should tell some one how much they have to pay an employee,
I will not vote for any one who wants to give the police unlimited power, nor should the police be used as revenue gatherers.
I will not vote for any one who thinks that it is alright for the government to put sin tax on tobacco and other products that do not happen to be approved by the medical society, plain extortion.
I voted for Ronald Regan because he was who i wanted as president, other than that i have mostly voted for who i thought was the lessor evil, no more of that, if they will not say what they believe and make it plain, i will stay home and let the dam socialists have it, because that is what will happen any way if it keeps on going the way it is.
But Trump as a presidential candidate?? Absolutely no freaking way. I’d for sure rather have Palin, Daniels, Barbour, Cain, or Pawlenty. I’d almost rather have Romney or Huckabee.
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