In vs. Near, Part Duh
Sometimes, the difference between one preposition and another can be huge. Other times, not so much. Compare and contrast the following two purely fictitious sentences, uttered by two purely hypothetical characters I will call “Johnny” and “Neil.” Assume both John and Jon both served in the Coast Guard, with both serving on the same boat at the same time.
- Jon: I was in Mexico, sir. I worked along the border on the water.
- Neil: I was near Mexico, sir. I worked along the border on the water.
Upon hearing this exchange, some might conclude that either Jon and Neil are describing two separate incidents, or one of them is lying. I wouldn’t draw that conclusion myself, however. What would conclude is that both individuals are describing the same event truthfully. Neil, like most people, probably didn’t think of the southern half of the Rio Grande as being part of Mexico, although technically speaking, it is. Jon, by contrast, thought about issue, and correctly noted that at least some of the time that he patrolled the border, he was, strictly speaking, in Mexico.
Now consider a second hypthetical exchange between two more purely fictitious characters, whom I’ll call “Johnny” and “Cary.”
- Johnny: In fact, I remember spending Cesar Chavez Day of 1989 five miles across the Mexican border being shot at by our Canadian allies who were stoned and celebrating Cesar Chavez Day. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Clinton claimed there were no American troops was very real.
- Cary: In fact, I remember spending Cesar Chavez Day of 1989 five miles north of the Mexican border being shot at by our Canadian allies who were stoned and celebrating Cesar Chavez Day. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies near a country in which President Clinton claimed there were no American troops was very real.
Any questions?
August 26th, 2004 at 1:36 pm
It doesn’t sound like either of us will convince the other, I’m afraid.
Your hypotheticals don’t remotely capture what these guys really said.
Note that I have been very clear to say, Kerry obviously lied. There’s absolutely no question about that. However, O’Neill has gone around saying that they were never in Cambodia. Not just that they weren’t in Cambodia on the date and place Kerry said. He said it was ludicrous for Kerry to say they were in Cambodia, and if they ever HAD gone into Cambodia, they’d have been court martialed for it.
Only now we learn that he told the President that they DID go into Cambodia.
As you note, the difference between two prepositions can sometimes be huge, or sometimes be minor. Here, the difference betwen “in” and “near” is all the difference in the world. Remember, one of the Kerry campaign’s first responses was that Kerry had been “near” Cambodia. Kerry critics rightly denounced that, because there was a HUGE difference between “in” and “near,” given the nature of Kerry’s claims. Likewise, here, O’Neill is running around making a big deal of the fact that they weren’t in Cambodia. He’s the one who says this is a big deal. Now we learn that he told the President something different.
But in any event, X, we don’t need to debate between ourselves the difference between being “in” Cambodia and being “near” Cambodia. According to O’Neill, the difference would have been a court martial.
August 26th, 2004 at 1:52 pm
Canadians celebrating Cesar Chavez day, that’s as unbelieveable as Buddhists celebrating Christmas, oh dang wait. (Nice Parellel with that Xrlq).
August 26th, 2004 at 2:38 pm
“Your hypotheticals don’t remotely capture what these guys really said.”
You’re right, they weren’t “remote” at all. The first quote in each set was based on a verbatim quotation; all I changed was the country, the nationality of our ill-mannered allies, the implausible holiday they were supposedly celebrating, [UPDATE: the substance they were under the influence of,] the year of the alleged event, and the non-President named. The second quote for each shows how much or little rides on the in/near distinction you and the Democrats are so eager to pounce on as a “lie.” That’s it. Nothing “remote” about it, unless it is your position that the words “in” and “near” mean different things depending on which border you’re talking about.
August 26th, 2004 at 2:55 pm
I understand that those are based on real quotes. However, my point was that your “Jon” and “Johnny” are saying almost the same thing in each hypothetical. In reality, John Kerry and John O’Neill are saying very different things. That’s why your hypotheticals don’t remotely reflect what these guys are saying.
August 26th, 2004 at 3:05 pm
Not so. Both variations depend entirely on whether it is reasonable to accept that someone first said “in” but later backtracked to “near.” In O’Neill’s case, it doesn’t affect the substance of what he said at all. In Kerry’s, it completely kills it, which is why Kerry himself didn’t stick to his interim “Christmas Near Cambodia” theory for very long.
August 26th, 2004 at 3:11 pm
We just read O’Neill’s comments to the President differently, I guess. You seem to think he said he was in Cambodia, and then corrected himself. I don’t think that’s a reasonable reading of the transcript. He wasn’t backing down from saying he was in Cambodia. He was elaborating on his entry in to Cambodia, saying that he worked along the border.
It seems to me that you’re bending over backward to give O’Neill every conceivable benefit of the doubt. I’m inclined to hold Kerry and O’Neill to the same standard. In my view, they both flunk badly.
August 26th, 2004 at 4:59 pm
It sounds to me like YOU are bending over backwards here, perhaps out of a deep-seated need to find a moral equivalency where none existed. If Kerry’s lie about Cambodia were anywhere near as technical as O’Neill’s “lie” was, no one would be calling him a liar. Imagine the non-outrage if the only thing wrong with Christmas in Cambodia were that it really happened on New Year’s Day, and that he was really only 3 miles inside the border, not 5. Or, to make an even closer analogy O’Neill’s non-lie, suppose it happened right smack on the Cambodian border. Would anyone care? Would they call Kerry a liar because he claimed to have been “in Cambodia,” when he was really just “on” the Cambodian border? I doubt it. We could even have let “Christmas near Cambodia” go, if that story had in fact been true, and if mere nearness to the country had had any real significance (e.g., Nixon or Johnson had assured the world that not only were no U.S. troops in Cambodia, we didn’t have any troops with X miles of there, either). We wouldn’t call him a liar; we’d call him a person with a pretty good memory, though not a perfect one.
I do agree with you on one point: both Johns, like anyone else, should be held to the same standard. I disagree that hair-trigger charges of lying in response to every perceived inaccuracy IS that one standard. Where definitions are vague (is the border “in” the country or not?) or where the facts are unclear, or where enough time has passed that an imperfect memory is likely, then maybe it’s best we assume the guy isn’t lying. The only problem is that Kerry’s particular statements about Cambodia were so goofy and so far removed from reality that they leave no reasonable doubt for him to benefit from.
August 26th, 2004 at 8:03 pm
I’m afraid I’m not buying it either. A rep from Kerry’s campaign, Michael Meehan already tried this kind of argument, but it failed. The London Telegraph pointed out that the Mekong river does not run along the border between Vietnam and Cambodia, but rather that the Mekong Delta describes an area that runs roughly perpendictular to the border between the two countries. It just doesn’t work to say “I was in/near Cambodia when I patrolled the river on my swift boat.” Either you entered Cambodia, or you didn’t. O’Neill made a big deal about the fact that entering Cambodia was forbidden.
August 26th, 2004 at 9:02 pm
Did you catch O’Neill’s interview on H&C the other day? O’Neill made that point himself about the Mekong River. He then explained that the river he later patrolled was the canal system at Ha Tien, a.k.a. Bernique’s Creek, not the Mekong.
August 27th, 2004 at 6:45 am
“Or, to make an even closer analogy O’Neill’s non-lie, suppose it happened right smack on the Cambodian border. Would anyone care? Would they call Kerry a liar because he claimed to have been “in Cambodia,” when he was really just “on” the Cambodian border? I doubt it.”
That’s the crux of what I don’t get about your defense of O’Neill, X. Your hypothetical is exactly what happened! Kerry’s first (or one of his first, it’s hard to keep track) defense when this story broke was that he may have just been “near” Cambodia. I don’t recall what you wrote at the time, if anything, but the overwhelming consensus among Kerry critics was that Kerry had been caught in a lie, and that his fudging from in to near completely changed the point of his story. I didn’t see anyone on our side of the political aisle saying, “Oh, I guess that explains it then.”
August 27th, 2004 at 7:35 am
That’s because in Kerry’s case, it wouldn’t have explained anything. We all knew we had troops in Vietnam, which could be stationed anywhere in the country at any time. There is no irony, nor anything particularly remarkable, about being “near” Cambodia at a time when the President claims we have no troops “in” it. That’s like joining the Navy with the assurances that we have no troops stationed in Mexico, and then freaking out over being stationed in San Diego. Plus, he wasn’t “near” the country at that time, either. He was a good 50 miles away. If that’s “near” Cambodia, so is almost half the country.
You are right that some people on our side of the aisle were quick to jump on Kerry’s lie about Cambodia. I was not among them. Try searching my blog for the word “Cambodia,” and you’ll only find three posts. The first, dated April 16, had nothing to do with John Kerry or his Excellent Adventure / Bogus Journey. The other two were dated August 18 and 25, respectively, both well after every conceivable version of the Christmas in Cambodia story had been thoroughly debunked.
Did some people on our side of the aisle jump the gun? Probably. I don’t remember it that way myself; mostly, I remember Captain Ed and others asking questions that became increasingly critical, followed by “clarifications” from the Kerry camp that made no sense, and were themselves not true. But ultimately, it became clear that this was not a case of in vs. near hair-splitting. It was an outright fabrication, followed by a series of desperate attempts to save the story by offering up alternative stories that were also lies. If in the end, any semi-coherent version of Kerry’s story had proved true, with truth vs. lie turning on a perfect vs. imperfect memory or some petty semantic quibbling over whether a person patrolling a border should be considered “in” the neighboring country, I would be calling on Kerry’s critics to apologize for calling him a liar over this.
Conversely, if some occasional linguistic sloppiness makes O’Neill a liar, then I’m surely a liar myself. I’ll bet you are too, along with just about every other blogger whose archive goes back more than a few weeks. No one’s language is 100% precise, 100% of the time.
August 28th, 2004 at 10:38 pm
Debate: Did John O’Neill Lie About Being in Cambodia?
Some folks have argued that John O’Neill lied about being in Cambodia. The issue even came up in that L.A. Times piece that I praised earlier today. If you’re looking for a good debate between two people who feel passionately…
August 29th, 2004 at 5:48 am
You’re both right. But you’re both missing the point.
I suspect that O’Neill was “lying” — in the sense of stretching the truth — when he told Nixon that he had been in Cambodia… but not all lies are cut from the same flesh.
There is the lie of kindness: Yes, Aunt Nellie, that dress makes you look ten pounds lighter!
The lie of convenience: Yes, Aunt Nellis; I walked all the way around the house, and there are no burglars lurking in the shrubbery.
The lie of story-telling (I’m a novelist; this is my favorite): Sure I was in Cambodia — in fact, I captured three Viet Cong hiding there. Let me tell you about the VC and the thin, red line….
Each of these is harmless, innocuous. But then, there is the lie of bearing false witness: Sure I was in Cambodia; Nixon sent me there, that dirty Republican, while lying to the American people about our invasion of a neutral country.
There is reason that the Bible warns against bearing false witness (”you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” in the original Hebrew), but not against lying in general: to falsely accuse is the worst of all lies. In this category we also find the lie of theft and fraud: “Yes, that’s my billfold; I dropped it a few minutes ago;” “the mine detonated under my boat, PCF 94;” “I was in command when Alston was wounded.”
O’Neill’s only lie was to stretch the truth a bit in order to tell a good story. He was not running for office; he could not possibly be benefitted to another man’s undeserved diminishment by saying he was in Cambodia. He did nothing worse that I do when I get paid for it.
But Kerry’s lie, that he was in Cambodia on a secret mission, was meant to shiv the Republicans between the ribs and into the heart: see what a dishonorable man Nixon was? He sent us into Cambodia and lied to the American people! My Swiftie brothers committed atrocities and war crimes, just as I did!
This sort of lie is so low and despicable it leaves a slime trail like a slug. The comparison is stark.
Dafydd
August 29th, 2004 at 11:46 pm
Has anyone bothered to find out whether O’neill went into Cambodia when many US forces were there in April, May and June of 1970? Moreover, O’Neill has never claimed he was infiltrating “secret agent men” into Cambodia.
August 30th, 2004 at 7:08 am
Not to my knowledge. If he did do that, then he has a much more serious credibility problem than I thought. After all, he didn’t just deny having penetrated Cambodia covertly; he claimed never to have been there at all.
August 31st, 2004 at 8:24 pm
Submitted for Your Approval
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September 2nd, 2004 at 9:52 pm
The Council Has Spoken!
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