Murtha Incoherent, But Schmidt Is the Story

Nothing illustrates the Left's ability to control the MSM better than the coverage of John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq last week. Days afterward, the story is not that Murtha called for immediate redeployment but then voted against a resolution calling for it and released statements denying that he wanted the withdrawal immediately. The story is that Jean Schmidt called him a coward but now has supposedly "backtracked."

Now, to the facts:

• At his press conference last Thursday, Murtha asserted:

I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice: The United States will immediately redeploy--immediately redeploy.
No schedule which can be changed, nothing that's controlled by the Iraqis, this is an immediate redeployment of our American forces because they have become the target.

• He then voted against a House resolution which asserted, "the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately."
• He then introduced his own resolution calling for withdrawal "at the earliest practicable date." Little attention to Murtha's revision of his language has been paid outside of conservative blogs. Less attention has been given to the insight that no one on any side wants troops deployed longer than is "practicable." And, of course, little attention has been given to the fact that Murtha, though expediently voting for the original war resolution, consistently has spoken against the war for at least two years.
• Meanwhile, Jean Schmidt made a statement in the well of the House about cowards, not Marines, cutting and running. In her statement Murtha was not the subject of any clause in which "coward" was a predicate but the object of a preposition indicating that she directed the third-person statement to him from an Ohio legislator. Consequently she was accused of calling Murtha a coward, and her subsequent statement that she regrets making a statement that was misunderstood is now labeled as "backtracking."
• Meanwhile, premature-onset-of-dementia patient Richard Cohen has in his Washington Post opinion column stated that Democratic congressmen, and presumably Cohen himself, aren't accusing Bush of lying (proved by the absence of sentences with "Bush" as subject and "liar" as predicate in the Congressional Record), though Cohen thinks that the term "useful idiot" probably applies.
• Meanwhile, the Post also reports that actual military officials are already talking about the likely practicability of beginning the American withdrawal/redeployment after the December Iraqi elections.

The moral of this story: in the MSM, if you're on the right, your words will be taken with the worst possible implication, and you, not your interpreters, will be held responsible for the implications drawn. If you're on the left, you have every opportunity of denial, clarification, rewording, or revising, and your interpreters, not you, will be held responsible for the clear meaning of your statements. If you're on the left, you can make outrageous statements, then say that they really meant something sensible, ignore the fact that the other side has actually set forth the same policy already. If you're on the right, no matter what you say is your policy or what you do as your policy, your judgment, reason, honesty and ethics are always suspect. If you're on the left, you therefore with impugnity can accuse people on the right of anything.

As someone whose profession is making sense of texts, I can only say that the situation in politics is not much different than the situation in biblical interpretation. If it weren't for wing-nuts understanding speech acts in absurd ways, we who serve by trying to understand those speech acts in sensible ways would have little to do.