August 8,2015
Mark Levin at Bookends Sunday, August 9th @ 10:00am
New York Times Bestselling author and syndicated talk-show host, Mark Levin, will sign his new book: Plunder & Deceit
Bookends, 211 E. Ridgewood Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ 07450 201-445-0726
“Mark was shown where he made a mistake in stating in [an end note] that delegates from Vermont belatedly attended the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. In reality, Vermont was not even a state until 1791. Before that it was a disputed territory between New Hampshire and New York. So Vermonters were not asked to nor were they qualified to attend the Philadelphia convention. He gave his challenger no credit for reading his book carefully and bringing this non-trivial mistake to his attention. He then refused to sign the book on the page where the [end note] appeared and showed distinct signs of impatience and annoyance when he opened the front of the book and began to sign it.”
Well, it’s now almost two years on from the August 18, 2013 booksigning event at Ridgewood’s Bookends bookstore at which a Ridgewood resident: 1) informed Mr. Levin that he had made the above-described end note error in his new book, “The Liberty Amendments,” and 2) asked him the following question when he was signing his copy of the new book: According to what possible definition of the Constitutional term Natural Born Citizen is your friend Ted Cruz eligible to run for or hold the office of President of the United States?
Fast forward to August, 2015, and Mark’s friend Ted Cruz is trailing badly to a GOP frontrunner (Donald Trump) who earlier this year squarely questioned Cruz’s eligibility to run for or hold the office of POTUS based on the indisputable fact that Cruz was born in 1970 in Alberta, Canada. So, the question posed by the Ridgewood, NJ resident to Mark Levin on August 18, 2013, and to which Levin reacted so very poorly by berating and slandering his interlocutor that very day at the Bookends booksigning event, and on August 19, 2013 and August 29, 2013 on his nationally syndicated radio program, remains both relevant and unanswered (that is, at least, if you were to ask his opponents in the race for the Republican Party nomination for President if the United States).
What else is happening in August, 2015? Well, among other things, Mark Levin has written a new book, “Plunder and Deceit”, which was released yesterday, August 4th. Many hardcover copies of this new book are on display and available for sale at Bookends in Ridgewood. Apparently, Levin is just as eager as he was two years ago to secure sufficiently high early sales numbers to land himself on the New York Times bestseller list, because he is once again scheduled to attend a summer booksigning event for his new book at Bookends in Ridgewood, this time on Sunday, August 9, 2015. (It seems the New York Times tracks book sales at a select few (perhaps ten?) bookstores in the Northeast Corridor to determine book placement on its various bestseller lists, and…who knew?…Bookends in Ridgewood is one of those select few bookstores!)
This commenter, curious to know if Mark Levin had “found the time” to look into the above-discussed problem with the erroneous end note in “The Liberty Amendments,” went to Bookends on the release date of “Plunder and Deceit” (yesterday, Tuesday, August 4, 2015) and found a copy of the paperback version of “The Liberty Amendments”, the first edition of which was published perhaps a year ago, well after Mr. Levin had been informed of the error in the original hardcover version.
So after all this, after recklessly abusing the Ridgewood resident who brought the mistake to his attention,: 1) did Levin and his publisher find, upon reflection, that he had in fact made the above-discussed mistake in his end note in the original hardcover version?, and 2) if the answer to question number 1 is ‘yes’, did Levin and his publisher make an appropriate correction to that end note in the subsequently-published paperback version?
As it turns out, the answers to those two questions are as follows: 1) Yes; and 2) No.
The footnote was changed to eliminate the earlier reference to the disputed territory of Vermont. So the Vermont reference was acknowledged as a mistake. This much is commendable. However, the context of the end note in question (i.e., the passage of the main text with which the end note is associated), required Levin and his publisher to insert in place of “Vermont” the name of the actual state (in addition to New Hampshire), delegates from which had not yet completed the trip to Philadelphia to attend the Constitutional Convention. This Levin and his publisher failed to do. Just how much spoonfeeding do they need to get this right?
So the end note in question remains screwed up, almost two years after “The Liberty Amendments” was released. Does anyone in the vast TheRidgewoodBlog readership know what original state Levin is still neglecting to recognize as one of the twelve (Rhode Island objected to the whole idea of the convention and never sent any delegates) that faithfully participated in the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787?
Ann Coulter is apparently lining up to receive the same treatment from Mark Levin as his Ridgewood, NJ interlocutor:
Twitter comment from Ann Coulter during the Republican candidates debate on Thursday:
Ann Coulter–Verified account @AnnCoulter.
@SenTedCruz gave a good answer on immigration. Too bad he’s not a natural born citizen!
6:37 PM – 6 Aug 2015
https://mobile.twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/629466483807154178
Why does the “hemorrhoid” with ears or “the skawker” (as one of his radio colleagues on the same station calls him) get away with the “birther” stuff on the current POTUS and legitimize a candidate that fits his twisted ideological profile…. Obama was born in Hawaii, Green Eggs and Ham was born in Canada…
the problem is anyone normal can show their birth certificate in 2 minutes , Obama turned nothing into something
He produced it… born in Hawaii… Green Eggs and Ham is not a natural born citizen… but according to the squawker, he’s eligible to run…
Levin justifies sacheting past the issue of his friend Cruz’s POTUS eligibility by directing his interlocutors to the rigid, clamped down cover he has had in place for the past 8 years foreclosing all discussion of what he has regularly referred to as “that birther crap” as it has related to the question of Obama’s POTUS eligibility. As a result, he can, with a straight face, maintain his same policy now, as his friend runs for POTUS. Aha…BUT: we know that Levin’s familiarity and friendship with Ted Cruz predates by many years Obama’s 2006-2008 run for president which resulted in the latter’s January 2009 inauguration. Accordingly it is not too much of a stretch to attribute Levin’s longstanding though seemingly artificial or arbitrary (or at least never adequately explained) ban on the discussion of the natural born citizen issue directly to Levin’s longstanding admiration and solicitude for Ted Cruz. In other words, are we, Levin’s listeners, to be condemned to eternal perdition for inferring, from his current full-throated and unquestioning support for Cruz’s POTUS candidacy, a soft spot in Levin’s much-vaunted support for the U.S. Constitution? And if in fact Levin is willing to jettison or deliberately ignore or twist the original meaning of the Constitutional term “natural-born Citizen” in order to permit the office of Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces to devolve on his friend Ted Cruz, can we be blamed for observing a heaping load of irony in the fact that, first, he just got done writing and marketing a book (“The Liberty Amendments”) about a series of amendments he thinks we should make to the U.S. Constitution, and second, he regularly holds himself out as an expert on U.S. Constitutional Law? Think about it–shouldn’t a person who authors and sets out to promote the adoption of ten or so proposed AMENDMENTS to the Constitution be as assiduous as possible in establishing and maintaining his personal Bona Fides in terms of declaring what the EXISTING or CURRENT language of the U.S. Constitution actually means? Otherwise, why would he have any credibility with respect to how the judges of the federal and state courts would or should construe his proposed NEW CONSTITUTIONAL LANGUAGE? Isn’t precision in terms of the language used of paramount importance when it comes to proposing new constitutional amendments?
Mark Levin claims a lot of knowledge about the thoughts and writings of the founding fathers, and about founding era events. And his claims are probably well-founded (so to speak).
But just like anyone else, he doesn’t know everything and can stand to listen to others when they put in their two cents.
According to the transcript of his radio program on Thursday 8/19/2013 he said “Some of us actually know what the founding fathers said. Some of us actually know what occurred before the nation actually became a nation. What conventions were. How they were conducted. Who sent delegates. How they were selected. How they voted. We know! And you don’t. It’s obvious. With your silly … articles.”
But when he wrote his new book, did Mark Levin really know, for example, who sent delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia?
Here’s the last sentence of a paragraph from Chapter 3 of his new book “The Liberty Amendments, Restoring the American Republic” to which an end note number 6 applied:
“In the convention’s first vote on the election of the larger house of Congress by the people, the vote was six states voting yes, two voting no, with two divided.”
In the first edition (hardcover) of “The Liberty Amendments”, Chapter 3’s endnote 6 reads, in relevant part, as follows:
“Delegates from Vermont and New Hampshire had not yet arrived and taken their seats at the convention. Rhode Island chose to send no delegates to the convention and did not, in fact, ratify the Constitution until May 29, 1790.”
So did Mark Levin really know who sent delegates to the Constitutional Convention? It’s got to be an open question, because he apparently mistook Vermont as one of the original thirteen colonies and states, and forgot about Maryland!
Vermont was not yet a U.S. state in 1787, so it was not invited to the Philadelphia convention that year. It was eventually admitted as our fourteenth state in 1791. The correct information is that on May 31, 1787, when the vote on the election of the larger house of Congress by the people took place, no delegates had arrived yet from the states of New Hampshire or Maryland.
Folks from Maryland might not be pleased with this (now repeated) slight. And rightly so! If he shows up in Maryland for a booksigning he might want to be prepared to answer a question or two about it… Just sayin’!
For what it’s worth, at the time of publication of the first paperback edition of “The Liberty Amendments”, presumably in 2014, the phrase “Vermont and” no longer appeared in Endnote 6 to Chapter 3, having been simply deleted therefrom by Levin and his publisher. The author and his editors should have gone further and taken the trouble to revisit the original source material for this information, i.e., James Madison’s published notes from the 1787 convention itself. Had they done so in response to the Ridgewood resident’s timely advice, they would have known that they needed to REPLACE the word “Vermont” (Vermont being a mere disputed territory in 1787), with the word “Maryland” (Maryland being one of the original thirteen states that entered into the U.S. Articles of Confederation).
Paul Smith, I am with you on this one.
James, I realize your politics are “Beyond the Fringe” into never never land, but are you saying you are a “birther?” And on that subject, can you name one President who actualy had to show his birth certificate? The short version of President Obama’s birth certificate was available to all, but it was the long version that was finally released to shut Trump up. Frankly I would have never done that.
“Plunder and Deceit.” The campaign slogan for The Three Amigos next year?