This too-clever-by-half edit of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech says to me that Vanity Fair could use better editors. Of course, the snark starts with editing a transcript and not the speech prepared as written. Granted, if Peter Robinson had turned in this speech to Reagan the Gipper would have sent it back. But some of the speech is clearly just extemporaneous speech. Editing punctuation on a transcript is not a criticism of the original speaker.
Setting that aside, let’s look at a couple of their “improvements”.
Original speech:
From the shores of Maine and California to the tip of Barrow, we live in peace because centuries ago many fought for something far greater than themselves, and so many continue to fight for us today.
Vanity Fair wants to make it:
From the shores of Maine and California to the tip of Barrow, we live in peace because 233 years ago many brave men and women fought for something far greater than themselves, and so many continue to fight today.
How does adding “brave men and women” improve the sentence? Worse, the wonkish 233 years is a clumsy replacement for the perfectly adequate “centuries”. Nobody thinks that centuries means exact multiples of 100 years, for crying out loud.
Later on, Vanity Fair substitutes God for faith (they aren’t really the same thing) without improving the sentence at all. And they want her to look dumb for saying Seward was in Lincoln’s cabinet instead of Andrew Johnson’s. Yes, Seward’s purchase of Alaska happened in Johnson’s administration, but he was a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, too.
Those aren’t the only bad edits. Glass houses, anybody?
I’m not a huge Palin fan, and I’m not trying to be an apologist. The thing I like most about her is that leftists like these at VF treat her with such disdain. They must be very afraid of her.