I can understand why Mary Katharine Ham might think that artists and writers are only productive if they work for private corporations and make barrels of money — but what does she have against proper quotation style?
From Rachel Maddow’s show last night, here’s a jaw-dropper from the woman who brought you, “We have to pass the bill, so you can find out what’s in it.” As I keep saying, the Democratic message mavens are working overtime, apparently to woo the all-important swing vote in Williamsburg to health care:
“Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”
If Pelosi wants us to imagine it, let’s do it with a few caveats, shall we? If liberal Boomers such as Nancy Pelosi insist on creating government incentives for a generation of people to be unemployed artists who nonetheless have their health care paid for by productive members of society, there will be fewer productive members of society.
Setting aside substantive disagreement, here is the problem with that sentence Ham quoted from the Pelosi interview: It isn’t a sentence. Or, to be more precise, it’s a simple sentence that is one half of a compound sentence. It’s not just that Ham has left out the rest of the quote — she’s ended her quote with a period, and no ellipses, to give the impression that this IS the entire sentence!
Ham cut off Pelosi’s remark mid-sentence in order to distort its meaning. Here is the entire sentence:
Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job loss because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar—you name it, any condition—is job locking.
Scott Johnson displays the same sneering disdain for “unproductive” artists and writers as Ham does, and he, like her, does not include the second half of Pelosi’s sentence. But at least he has the decency and minimal honesty to end the quote with the standard editorial indication that the quotation is incomplete. It’s called an ellipsis, Mary Katharine.
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