monkey butt

[Victor Steinbok]

A bit of grammar...

Evan McMorris-Santoro--one of TPM enterprising reporters whose writing
could be significantly improved by a sharp editor--put out an
interesting introduction to a piece on David Axelrod supposedly
comparing Newt Gingrich to a monkey butt. I believe Axelrod actually
compared Newt to a monkey whose butt can now be observed, not to the
butt itself, but who is counting?

http://goo.gl/tOvSF
> Any question that the Obama campaign will ignore the surging Newt
> Gingrich to continue their attacks on Mitt Romney was answered in full
> today when Obama senior strategist David Axelrod compared the former
> House Speaker to the ass end of a monkey.

To shorten this up a bit, "Any question that X was answered in full when
Y." IMHO this is a prime example of the need for a supervising editor.
It's not that the example is unusual--I've heard others express
themselves similarly--but it is a bit difficult to decipher when
skimming the news. In particular, with a proper choice of X and Y, this
may be a perfectly ordinary expression. But not here. More fully, I
would analyze this as "Any question that X [is true] was answered [in
the affirmative] when Y." There are two difficulties for me here--first,
the statement would be a lot easier to parse if "that" were replaced
with "whether". Second, Y does not answer the question in the
affirmative--at least not the way EMS stated it. As written, the answer
to the question is "No!" So there may be a hidden hypernegation behind
this structure.

As for the point of comparison, here's Axelrod's line (quoting someone
else, in part):

> He said, 'just remember the higher a monkey climbs on a pole, the more
> you can see his butt.' So, you know, the Speaker is very high on the
> pole right now and we’ll see how people like the view.

I'll let you judge which interpretation is correct.

VS-)

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