There's no "I" in Team...

...but there is a "tea" in Teamsters.

Look, I know a lot of the talking heads are all aflutter about Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa's verbage in his Labor Day speech in Detroit. But you know what I did? I listened to the "offending" passages and came to my own conclusion before I let the pundits influence me.

Here's what I HONESTLY believe I heard Hoffa say: We've all got a vote...let's take these SOBs out and reclaim America (to paraphrase). I think he was talking about the damage that so many Republican/Tea Party types have inflicted upon union workers on the local, state, and national level. I think the man was asking people to vote these people out whenever their terms expire. I DO NOT think he was asking them to make that expiration premature through violence.

I have no feeling one way or the other about Hoffa himself, and I don't think that I'm looking at this as an AFL-CIO surrogate. I'm examining this flap from the point of view of a grammarian and a contextual reader. As such, having made my evaluation, I was amazed at the tenor and assumption of the press coverage that followed. Did no one else hear the prefacing "We have a vote" bit?

I may be naive, probably am, but if I thought Hoffa was inciting violence I would say so and call him out on the carpet. If he did in fact mean to elicit such a response, I think he should offer an apology. But if, on the other hand, my reading of his intention is correct, he owes nothing to anyone except perhaps a healthy dose of skepticism toward all his detractors, no matter which end of the political spectrum they claim as their own.

Sometimes we need to be reminded not to succumb to a "produced view" of reality. Sometimes we just need to pay attention to the first draft and not the multiple revisions.