Are these sentences in the “Christian Science Monitor” acceptable English these days? [closed]

Question

This is from a Christian Science Monitor story on Nancy Pelosi's decision to stay on as House Minority Leader. The first report I saw in the Washington Post had only one questionable sentence, but this second report has two:

“Being actively involved in politics at this level is really insatiable,” Representative Pelosi said at a Wednesday press conference, flanked by her female Democratic colleagues. “There aren’t enough hours in the day for me. There’s so much more I want to do.”

Are these sentences acceptable English to most native speakers, or are they clearly errors (one misusage of an adjective and one dangling modifier)?

Answer 1

There's really no doubt that flanked by . . . applies to Pelosi rather than the press conference, although a careful editor might have moved it to the beginning of the sentence. The choice of insatiable, however, is unfortunate. It describes something that cannot be satisfied and the structure of the sentence means that it modifies being involved. Is being involved something that can be satisfied or not satisfied? Rarely, I’d have thought. What she presumably meant was that politics itself, rather than the being involved, is insatiable in that it is extremely demanding of its practitioners’ time. A better way of expressing it might have been ‘Being actively involved in politics at this level takes an enormous amount of time.’ But which of us would like to put ourselves in the public spotlight and have our every word, however spontaneously produced, analysed in this way?