Infinitive Splitter

The President of the United States has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (available to paying subscribers only). He doesn’t say anything new, policy-wise, but here are the two paragraphs that stood out to me:

Our priorities begin with defeating the terrorists who killed thousands of innocent Americans on September 11, 2001 — and who are working hard to attack us again. These terrorists are part of a broader extremist movement that is now doing everything it can to defeat us in Iraq.

I don’t pay a whole lot of attention anymore when the president speaks, so I didn’t realize he was still clinging to the saying-it-without-saying-it game. I should have known better, I suppose.

Here’s the more interesting (to me) section:

But we can and should do more. It’s time Congress give the president a line-item veto. And today I will announce my own proposal to end this dead-of-the-night process and substantially cut the earmarks passed each year.

Emphasis mine. Not so fast, Mr. President. As the BBC’s Roger Woodham notes, it’s customary to “use past tenses to describe things in the present or future that are imagined or unreal” (e.g. “It’s time Congress gave the president a line-item veto”).

Since the president’s own party controlled Congress for six years without giving him a line-item veto, and there’s no reason to think that his opposition will be any more generous, the future success of such a proposal should indeed be described as “imagined or unreal.”