[flashingleds]

There was a great line in the old TV show Pretender along the lines of "It's my observation that anybody who begins a sentence "with all due respect" typically doesn't have it"

I've always interpreted prefaces like that (along with its relatives "with all due respect" or the suffix "I'm just saying") as a way of turning the sentence into "This is an objective observation that should be made; don't blame the messenger". Used well it's a good way to strip subjectivity from some objective facts, used poorly it's a good way to project a subjective interpretation onto objective facts.