OMG, this is making my head hurt.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham has just sent a letter to Barack Obama’s defense secretary nominee, Chuck Hagel. Graham asks if, at a 2010 appearance at Rutgers University, Hagel said Israel “was risking becoming an apartheid state.”

A law student in attendance, Kenneth Wagner, wrote a contemporaneous email detailing Hagel’s remarks, saying the former Nebrasks senator had said the state of Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state.” These allegations were first reported Tuesday by the Washington Free Beacon. Here’s the relevant quote from the Free Beacon report:

“I am sitting in a lecture by Chuck Hagel at Rutgers,” Wagner wrote in the email. “He basically said that Israel has violated every UN resolution since 1967, that Israel has violated its agreements with the quartet, that it was risking becoming an apartheid state if it didn’t allow the Palestinians to form a state. He said that the settlements were getting close to the point where a contiguous Palestinian state would be impossible.”

Second hand emails… again. Ahem.

basically (ˈbeɪsɪklɪ) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]— adv

1. in a fundamental or elementary manner; essentially: strident and basically unpleasant

2. ( sentence modifier ) in essence; in summary; put simply: basically we had underestimated mother nature

I believe those things are subjective, not objective. Someone who hadn’t lost their house in a storm might say, “Basically we underestimated Mother Nature” someone who lost their house might say “Basically, Mother Nature stomped on us”.