"Misquoted", "Misconstrued", What do they REALLY mean, then?

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)

If you've read the Salon article about the tea parties by now (and if you haven't, you should), odds are the line borrowed for the title has stuck with you: "On 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building." It's kind of hard to even begin to think of how to respond to that, or to even try, isn't it? In an article full of outrageous and sometimes disgusting comments, that one really stands head and shoulders above (or below, as it were) all else.

But it's not the most telling line in the story. Close, but not quite.

To me, what's most telling is the way the guy who said that prefaced his shocking comment. Here's the whole remark: "I love my country and I don't like what's going on. Government -- to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we'd start from scratch, we'd be better off today." (Emphasis mine.)

"This will probably be misquoted but". I read and re-read the quote several times, both on its own and in the context of the article, and I was never able to make any real sense of that. How on earth could he expect that comment to be interpreted as anything less than outrageously offensive? The crazy thing is, it probably made perfect sense to him that as long as he attached that disclaimer, he could claim that he wasn't actually saying...well, exactly what he clearly did say. And of course the FoxNewsMax crowd would get it as well. If we say the guy called for destroying the Capitol and killing every member of Congress, well, we're a bunch of namby-pamby liberals and we're misquoting him just like he said we would! As for what he really did mean, well, I couldn't even formulate an educated guess on that one.

But the quote stuck with me all the same, because it sounded familiar. I couldn't quite place where I'd heard that trick before, but I was pretty sure I had. It took a while, but I remembered. Rep. Sue Myrick, R-NC used it to great effect back in 2003: "You know, and this can be misconstrued, but honest to goodness (husband) Ed and I for years, for 20 years, have been saying, `You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.’ Every little town you go into, you know?"

Okay, so it's not surprising that two right-wingers used the same offensive rhetorical trick six years apart. Or maybe, it is surprising that it's only happened twice in that time (that I've noticed at least). It is, however, telling. Once I remembered the Myrick quote, I found myself also recalling how at the time, I wondered what she could possibly mean by "misconstrued" and I also wondered how that comment could possibly be construed in an inoffensive way. I couldn't think of a way then and I still can't.

Now that I've seen it twice, it's got me wondering if it's a form of dog-whistle politics. "I'm going to say something indisputably offensive, but first I'll warn you that it 'could be interpreted as being offensive' without actually quite saying that, so when The Liberal Media calls me on it, we can say 'Well, he/she told you it could be misinterpreted'." What do you all think? Have you ever heard anybody try to justify those comments, or offer up an inoffensive interpretation, no matter how implausible? Has this actually been going on for decades and I just never noticed?

(Halfway through writing this, it occurred to me that Jerry Falwell's "apology" for his comments about 9/11 sort of fit here too. But he really just implied the "this could be misinterpreted but" rather than saying it, and he only even did that after being rightly criticized for his comments, not while he was making them in the first place.)