It seems the joke went over your head. The point was that vague probabilistic statements equivalent to Carr's 'we can do this the easy way or we can do this the

It seems the joke went over your head. The point was that vague probabilistic statements equivalent to Carr's 'we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way' are easily understood as thinly veiled threats even if they're not delivered on official FCC notepaper and written in verbose bureaucratic language leveraging established procedural rules.