John Roberts Scratched The Disc

[Syrinx]

Are you still pissed at Roberts for screwing the oath?

I feel odd about saying "still," because I wasn't at first.

But the more I think about it, it really screwed up our record of history.

Don't you just know that it pissed President Obama?

But, as always, he was a gentleman.

I don't know if Roberts did it on purpose, but if he didn't, he really screwed up.

He scratched our Blu-Ray.

[Quakerfriend]

1. Good Morning, Syrinx! And, yes I am still upset about it.

I have no doubt that it was by design.

To me, it shows the extraordinary the lengths they will go to. Sadly, I do not believe that many on the extreme right can change for the good. But, still we must hope.

And, I admire Obama for letting it roll off. He is, through his example, showing us how we should react to this sort of stuff.

[dorkulon]

2. Honestly, I think it's just silly to imagine he flubbed it on purpose.

This is a scratch on Roberts' record at least as much as it is on Obama's. He thought he could do it from memory, and he screwed it up. These things happen.

[hlthe2b]

7. Agree.... Roberts looks the fool.

He got nervous. He choked. End of story.

[KharmaTrain]

3. He Choked...

Here's the screwy "fact"...he claimed he studied the oath for a week...one week to memorize 3 lines? Methinks the nerves and the moment got the best of him. Here's one of his few times in the real limelight and face to face with the man who will determine who the next SCOTUS Justices are...as well as set the political tone for the next decade. The little gerbils in Roberts head must have been running at full speed.

President Obama bailed his sorry ass out...let him do the re-do...and gave the dude a little bit of re-assurance. Who knows maybe that will sway a vote or two down the road.

Cheers...

[malaise]

4. An interesting take here

Apparently Roberts is an activist grammarian :rofl:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22pinker.html?_r=2&em
<snip>
How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.

[Vickers]

5. "shibboleths"

I want to hear Mike Tyson pronounce that.

[terisan]

6. John Roberts agreed to add " so help you God" to constitutional oath at Obama's request

The Chrustian right is thrilled. Now why did Obama do this?-make the oath of office query by the Chief Justice a religious oath---even GW Bush never did this.
Obama screwed up our Constitution and it was no accident.

[dansolo]

8. Aren't the two versions grammatically identical?

The placement of "faithfully" in that sentence has no effect on the meaning. If Roberts has a habit of eliminating split verbs in his legal opinions, then it is very likely that he inadvertently screwed it up. Either that, or he felt that he needed to correct it, but then when Obama paused, he realized that he really should have stated it as is. I don't believe that he messed up specifically because he was administering it to Obama. I think that he would have made the same mistake if he had been administering it to McCain.

[Kansas Wyatt]

9. I think he just screwed up.

He hasn't been use to the overwhelming crowds and he was now in the spotlight to a very important event in American History, with millions of people there looking right at him.

Obama thought and tried to repeat the first part of what Roberts said, but Roberts kept going on. There's your first clue that Roberts was nervous. When Obama tried to do what he was suppose to, it interrupted Roberts and threw him off and he was already nervous.