In the end, the debate was about one jot of punctuation, a comma. But the issue was a big one, namely the Republican Party's platform on the sensitive subject of tax increases. Meeting in Dallas last week, the party's platform subcommittee on economic policy began its deliberations with a staff-written version blessed by the White House. The draft declared that Republicans "oppose any attempts to increase taxes which would harm the recovery and reverse the trend to restoring control of the economy to individual Americans."
As grammarians and those used to political ooze quickly realized, that language did not oppose all tax...