Responding to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s discussion of immigration reform last Wednesday, Congressman Tom Tancredo had this to say:

Rep. Tancredo leads the Immigration Reform Caucus in the House, a group that apparently hangs its hat on the idea of stepped up enforcement of existing immigration restrictions. He was a fan of the Minutemen if that gives you your bearings.

A little familiarity with Rep. Tancredo makes his resistance to Chertoff’s plan not surprising in the least. But there’s something compelling in the way he expresses it in this comment to the LA Times.
First off, prefacing his position with the complaint that his opponents are “annoying” is comical and a little endearing. It seems unusual that politicians take this tone with reporters – that of a sibling bedeviled by a little brother or sister who keeps repeating everything they say (“Stop that!” “Stop that!” “You’re so annoying” “You’re so annoying”).

Fittingly most of Tancredo’s annoyance is actually with his opponents’ use of language and with the general complication in which language doesn’t just mean what it says.

As it turns out, language is a real point of interest for Tancredo. An urgent headline on his Congressional home page announces: Tancredo calls out the BBC for its ridiculous refusal to label the London jihadists as ‘terrorists.’ Here’s his “calling out”:

He doesn’t just call the BBC out, he does so because they wouldn’t “call out” the terrorists. Sadly, though, I have to wonder if, had the BBC not decided to substitute “bomber” for “terrorist” early in their coverage, an annoyed Rep. Tancredo would have posted something lamenting that even though the BBC was using the right word, they didn’t mean it in the right way.

Brilliantly, Tancredo ends his observations about the failure of the left to use the right words with this charming bit of sarcasm:

So the guy who gets annoyed when people take his rhetoric turns around and nabs “cesspool of degenerate infidels” from the terrorists who the BBC won’t name. On top of that, the irony surrounding its usage is such that Tancredo can simultaneously tip off his audience that these are not his hyperbolic characterizations while at the same time suggesting that he basically agrees that Hollywood is a degenerate cesspool. Tom Tancredo, wordsmith.

Returning to the original quote, all of this is a way of noting that Tancredo’s lament – “They use the right words, they just don't do the right thing” – basically describes the nature of political speech. As C Bush wrote in April

The rhetorical palette of politics is, to be sure, a restricted one; so much so that one wonders if the shady reputation of political speech is in part simply the result of trying to cram too much meaning into too few words.